Win Win (2011)

Tom McCarthy's Win Win arrives from 2011, a year in which a struggling New Jersey attorney could commit a modest act of guardianship fraud and the culture would treat it as a character flaw instead of a policy failure. Paul Giamatti plays Mike Flaherty, a man who pockets a monthly stipend for an elderly client he has parked in a care facility, then absorbs the client's grandson into his household once the boy proves useful on the wrestling mat. The film regards this arrangement with warmth. It asks whether Mike is a good man doing a bad thing, and it answers, gently, that he is a tired man doing an ordinary thing.

The picture is a humanist dramedy of the old school, and it declines nearly every invitation the current moment would extend. The cast is white, suburban, and untroubled by the question. No character pauses to explain the moral architecture of the story. Nobody delivers a speech. The screenplay trusts its audience to notice that Mike's fraud is sad instead of systemic, and it never converts his financial anxiety into an argument about the machinery that produced it. Even Leo's dementia serves the plot, not a cause. The film has no thesis to press upon us.

What remains is craft: Giamatti's hangdog decency, Amy Ryan's steadying presence, a wrestling team that learns to win, and a resolution in which the guilty party tends bar and everyone is fine. This is a film about trying to be good, as the notices of the day had it, and it means that sincerely. It offers no instruction, no accounting, no scoreboard beyond the one in the gymnasium. In the ledger I maintain, it registers as a clean zero, and I record that fact without complaint. A quiet, well-made thing, guilty only of being decent.