PLOT: Mike (Paul Giamatti) is a struggling attorney, who moonlights as a high-school wrestling coach. After signing on to be an elderly man’s (Burt Young) guardian, he has to take in the man’s grandson, Kyle (Alex Shaffer), whose mother is in rehab. Slowly but surely, Kyle becomes an integral part of Mike’s household, even winning over his suspicious wife, Jackie (Amy Ryan), especially once it’s discovered that Kyle is a gifted wrestler, who helps lead Mike’s team to victory.
REVIEW: WIN WIN is yet another film that makes me livid about the current standards of the MPAA. As far as I’m concerned, even worse than their boneheaded attempt to stamp BLUE VALENTINE with an NC-17 was the way they classified THE KING’S SPEECH, as wholesome a film as I’ve ever seen, as an R. I imagine the MPAA is going to make the same blunder with WIN WIN, which deserves to be praised as one of the few quality family films to come out in the last few years. Instead, it’s all but guaranteed an R because of a handful of F-words, when a PG-13 would be a far more appropriate rating.
WIN WIN marks a big step into the mainstream for director Tom McCarthy, an occasional actor, who also directed THE STATION AGENT, and THE VISITOR. This is him working on a more standard piece of mainstream cinema, but he does a wonderful job of packaging it in a way that never lets the film get melodramatic, and allows it to keep enough of an edge to make it hipper than it might normally be.
McCarthy regular Bobby Cannavale has a great supporting role as Giamatti`s best friend, who eventually becomes the wrestling team`s assistant coach, opposite the great Jeffrey Tambor. He keeps the film from ever getting too over-the-top with the drama, with a couple of great one-liners, and an amusing (and not as creepy as it sounds) subplot about his emerging man-crush on the `too cool for school` Kyle, who turns out to be a pretty bad ass addition to their wrestling team.
Once again though, it makes me upset to think that a real, quality family flick like WIN WIN is going to get slapped with an R- Rating, due to some swearing, which is not excessive, but rather feels truthful, and altogether necessary to the parts of the movie it`s featured in. If you’ve got kids, and you’re looking for a solid family film, WIN WIN is really the film for you. Ignore the stupid R rating, which is undeserved, and makes the strongest case I`ve seen in a while for the abolition of the MPAA once and for all.