Reviews

Director Thomas McCarthy ("The Station Agent," "The Visitor") specializes in intimate indie dramas that center on people connecting with one another and then forging sort-of ad-hoc family unit that everyone involved desperately needs. His latest film "Win Win" follows the same sort of thematic elements and the results are really good. Not great and in my opinion not as great as his previous films but "Win Win" is a funny and rather intricate film about people trying to do the right thing and the failures and successes they have along the way.

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I genuinely like "Win Win" but it feels a little half-cooked. There're too many characters and I didn't really see the point of having some of them along. Bobby Canivale plays Mike's best friend Terry and he's a great comic foil but his role felt like a bit of a device designed to lift the mood. Tambor's character also serves the same purpose and he disappears about three quarters of the way through the film. I like the way McCarthy has constructed a Hal Ashby-like film where characters have many dimensions, desire to do right but make mistakes even though they have the best intentions. But here, it felt like Mike is treated rather unfairly by the end of the film. It's tough to walk the line between characters who aren't black and white but I felt as though the film stumbles a bit in that area.

Overall though, "Win Win" is a nice little indie drama. The wrestling plot line is fun and exciting and unknown actor Shaffer as Kyle is one of those "where did this guy come from!" kind of special performances. I think "Win Win" will be a successful film for people of all ages, I just thought it missed the mark a little here and there.

By Don R. Lewis, from FilmThreat.com

The sports movie is the Happy Meal of American cinema, its main attraction being predictability: Unlikely heroes win, lose, win, lose big, make a comeback, leave the field triumphant. Everybody feels good.

There's no guarantee that everyone will be feeling good at the end of "Win Win," the not-quite-a-sports-movie from writer/director Tom McCarthy ("The Station Agent," "The Visitor"). High-school wrestling plays a big part in the film, but athletics are a means, not an end, to a story that's elegantly directed, expertly acted, laugh-out-loud funny, but very much "in the moment," as they say in sports: A hobbled economy has the characters in a half-nelson; money haunts the proceedings the way Dick Vitale haunts the Final Four; characters make as many questionable decisions as the umpires in the 2009 playoffs.

And yet, as the movie unfolds, you realize that what passes for naturalism in so much independent and indie-leaning cinema has become as ritualized as sumo: "Quirky" characters are very often clichés; relationships are marriages of narrative convenience; situations are preposterous. The principal joy of "Win Win" is how often it fails to meet one's programmed expectations. The effect is oddly exhilarating.

By John Anderson, from Wall Street Journal