If ever anyone had to be careful what they wished for, it's Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti), small town lawyer and wrestling coach. He's swindled one of his clients, a dementia patient, for enough cash flow to save his ailing business then tosses him into a care facility. No one gets hurt. The fly in this particular ointment is the man's runaway grandson Kyle who arrives to an empty house. Mike does the right thing and takes him in, in part because the boy is a wrestling champ with capacity to save his ailing team. Win win!

McCarthy (director of 2003's sublime The Station Agent) knows better than to make this a breezy morality tale which, on paper, is how it plays. This is a discomfiting mix of comedy and drama that rides a complex emotional roller coaster. On one hand, Mike's a cad who exploits the vulnerable, on the other a man who goes to extraordinary lengths to protect the innocent. How that makes you feel is the root of McCarthy's question. It's further complicated by Kyle's mother, a junkie fresh from rehab who wants the cash Mike's getting from her father. Once again, the boy gets caught in the drama.

Anchoring the film is Giamatti's delightfully brow-beaten persona as Mike painfully works to prop up this house of cards; juggling work, home and wrestling commitments with varied success. Support from Shaffer (a pro-wrestler in his film debut) is compelling as he nails teenage angst and inarticulacy, and all the spotty anxiety in-between. Although he's there to teach Mike a proxy lesson about growing up, his is not a text book character and neither Shaffer nor McCarthy treat it as such. It's this between-the-lines detail that makes Win Win such a pleasure.

While the story protects its characters from the worst life can throw at it, and as such remains on the faux side of reality, it retains a sense of honesty populated by people you want to get to know. Ordinary people trying to keep it together, which is quite extraordinary thing in film. And as Mike's life regains a kind of normalcy (not a happy ending, this remains firm indie fare), McCarthy faithfully ticks the boxes for which he's becoming favourably known: striking personalities, heart felt emotion and off beat naturalism. They make a compelling combination; a win win if you will.

// COLIN FRASER
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