Win Win (left) is the latest film by Tom McCarthy, director of two most excellent films, The Station Agent and The Visitor, both of which screened, if not debuted, at Sundance. I ran into its star Paul Giamatti before Christmas and he was very coy about it, saying only, “I'd be interested to see what you think of it.” I wonder now if there were some modesty issues at play, because this is one of his best performances yet; there's less of the sadsack persona, and although his character does have a few scruple issues, there's a lot of warmth in the character that Giamatti rarely gets to generate.He plays Mike Flaherty, a smalltown lawyer who coaches a wrestling team, and both his business and his boys are failing. Flaherty represents the elderly in custody matters, and when one of his clients starts showing signs of dementia, he becomes the man's legal guardian, ostensibly to honour his wishes to stay in his own home but really to pocket his care fee. Instead, Flaherty puts the old man in a rest home, in the belief that he has no living relatives, but the sudden arrival of a surly grandson changes the picture. A bleached-haired whippet, Kyle (Alex Shaffer) bonds with his grandfather and moves in with the Flahertys, dropping the bombshell that he is also an experienced wrestler with great form. Flaherty is gobsmacked and recruits the boy to his team, unaware that his godsend is also a liability, as Kyle's scheming druggie mother (Melanie Lynskey) is not far behind.
The plot sounds hokey but, as usual, McCarthy really works hard with his characters. Amy Ryan is superb as Flaherty's wife, Bobby Cannavale is his hilarious best friend and newcomer Shaffer is just perfect as the wrestling protege. I'm not quite sure how well the film will play in the UK, given our allergy to sports movies of any kind, but it deserves to be seen, and Fox Searchlight's positioning of it could lead to some awards* traction for Giamatti if the year proves less crowded than 2010.
I haven't seen many docs this year, but Corman's World: Exploits Of A Hollywood Rebel was a must-see, simply for reasons of personal taste. As a portrait goes, Alex Stapleton's film is a pretty reasonable introduction to the legendary B-movie director and producer, but for aficionados, it's a tougher call to recommend, since it's stuff that's mostly on the record. On that score, though, it does tell most of the right stories, dwelling rather amusingly on his cheapskate tendencies but skimping a little on some of his more artistic achievements (the psychedelic Poe cycle is criminally skimmed). God knows when the film was actually made, since three interviewees are now sadly dead (George Hickenlooper, Irvin Kershner and David Carradine), ex-Variety critic Todd McCarthy is filmed in front of a giant billboard advertising the trade magazine that fired him, and Bruce Dern complains that Corman has never won an honorary Oscar – which he did in November 2009. But though it is quixotic in its choices, there's a lot to enjoy, especially in the scenes where Alan Arkush and Joe Dante discuss their apprenticeship at Corman's New World company in the 1970s and in the extraordinary moment when a wise-cracking Jack Nicholson, once Corman's go-to guy, breaks down in tears.
Jesse Peretz's' My Idiot Brother (pictured) was one of the success stories of the festival, flogging to The Weinstein Company for some $7m. It's OK but rather typically Sundance; it plays like a studio movie with inferiority issues, which is a shame since star Paul Rudd is really rather charming. He plays Ned, a naïve man-child who goes to prison in the opening scenes after selling marijuana to a uniformed cop. On his release, Ned sets about getting his life straight, but his wide-eyed ways and guileless tendency to always tell the truth cause problems for his three sisters.
For what it is, My Idiot Brother (right) just about passes muster as a vehicle for the adorable Rudd, but the film hangs flabbily around him. It feels like a stingless Todd Solondz movie at times, and a subplot involving Steve Coogan as Ned's asshole documentary-maker brother-in-law feels especially superfluous. Most frustratingly for me, though, the film never seemed to use its characters as anything other than comedy plot devices. As is a common failure in indie movies of this kind, Ned's character traits seems to exist only for the purposes of time spanned in the movie and there is no sense of his supposedly close-knit family having dealt with his naivete and other foot-in-mouth behaviour for the past 30 years. It passed the time but didn't really work for me. Which is pretty much what I said about Little Miss Sunshine, so what do I know?* I hate myself for writing this sentence.
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