March is practically last year as far as the awards race is concerned and that’s a shame. Hollywood can’t release every good movie between September 1 and December 31 (though the studios seem to try harder to do just that every year) and inevitably excellent films get left out in the cold when it comes time for end of year recognition. That’s the risk faced by Tom McCarthy’s Win Win. Perhaps hoping to capitalize on the strong buzz it received at its Sundance premiere in January and to take advantage of a relatively quiet film release calendar, Fox Searchlight chose to begin Win Win’s limited release on March 18.
From a box office standpoint, that was probably a wise strategy. Win Win is a gentle film, couching its drama in plenty of humor while not forcing its relevance on the audience. Such a film risks getting buried in the onslaught of prestige pictures.
The thing is, Win Win is a story of ordinary, decent-but-flawed people trying to get by as best they can in today’s world. It doesn’t need millionaires playing a children’s game to carry its message, or a handsome man of comfort and privilege who is a bad husband but happens to own a big chunk of prime Hawaiian beachfront. There’s no murder-mystery at the story’s heart, nor nostalgic wishful thinking for a world that no longer exists, but Win Win is deeper and darker than it appears to be on the surface. It is a ground level human story that plumbs a surprising moral gray area and is more penetrating than it’s been given credit for.
I recently sat down with Win Win director/co-writer Tom McCarthy over coffee at the Four Seasons hotel bar in Beverly Hills to talk about his film more than 10 months after it made its Sundance debut. Following introductions, I congratulated him on his Spirit Award nomination for the Win Win screenplay and while he immediately expressed gratitude for the recognition, he also wished that his great cast had gotten more attention. To his mind, the script wouldn’t have worked if Paul Giamatti, Amy Ryan, Bobby Cannavale and the rest hadn’t been so believable and subtle. It’s not too surprising that he’d be so generous with his cast. While indie film fans know him as the director of The Station Agent and The Visitor, people don’t always make the connection that he’s also an actor who has appeared in such films as Good Night and Good Luck, Syriana, Flags of Our Fathers and 2012. I remember him best as the weaselly, crooked journalist Scott Templeton on the final season of HBO’s The Wire so that was my entry into the conversation.
Craig Kennedy: In a show filled with murderers and drug dealers and dirty cops and crooked politicians, your character on The Wire oddly has the distinction of being in my book one of the most dislikable. I think it’s because Scott Templeton is mostly an ordinary guy and therefore uncomfortably relatable to the audience. It seems to me you run a similar risk with Paul Giamatti’s character Mike Flaherty in Win Win. He could be any one of us, yet he makes this series of reprehensible decisions. Did you ever worry the audience would be alienated by him?
Tom McCarthy: Yeah, I thought the audience might have trouble with him. It was always let’s sort of wait and see. You throw Paul Giamatti and his persona and character into the mix, he’s got a history of playing some dubious characters, and I was very excited to see how that all coalesced and what the audience experience was. In a sense, you have the first few minutes of the movie to, for whatever reason, to like or get behind this guy and then he performs this act that’s tough to reconcile with this character. It was interesting to see audiences wrestle with that and still root for him at the end although you know he’s done wrong and deserves what he gets. I think to me that was always the most compelling thing about a story set in a very conventional world, suburban America. It’s a place that I flew from as a kid. I couldn’t wait to get out because of all the things it represents, but in this case we tried to embrace those things. At the same time, can we tell a story there that’s compelling?
I think the difference between Scott Templeton and Mike Flaherty possibly is I’m not sure Scott Templeton had so many positive attributes. If so, they weren’t in witness during The Wire. Very early on you’ve got this guy who’s sort of gnawing ambition and not much else. I think Mike is actually making a very good go of it in a lot of ways. He believes in what he does and he’s doing hard work, but he’s just gotten behind and he panics. That to me is interesting. When good people cross the line and then how they compartmentalize that, which I think he does.
Paul and I talked a lot about that and about that journey, what that was like for him, how not to let it weigh him down or weigh down his journey or the movie. In the best case scenario, the audience kind of forgets what happened and starts to enjoy themselves.
CK: Through the whole middle stretch you get caught up in the wrestling story and you sort of forget Mike is taking advantage of an old man stashed away in a home somewhere, but you keep reminding us of poor old Leo played by Paul Young…
TM: That to me was the other exciting little time bomb about this: how long can we go before the audience pushes back.
CK: But Mike isn’t evil either. Like most people, he’s not born Darth Vader, but he has a lapse in moral and professional judgment and then another to cover up for the first and it’s a slippery slope.
TM: Right, and sometimes then when you’re called to task for it and you find yourself talking about it, the language you use to rationalize it suddenly heard out loud doesn’t sound so good. I think about those guys at Enron who were rolling the blackouts in California and they were recorded joking about old ladies and this and that. When you hear it afterwards… I’m sure they were just fucking around, it wasn’t totally serious, but man did it just sound horrible and heartless, the epitome of corporate greed and stupidity.
This area where the movie is set in New Jersey – New Providence, Summit, Chatham – there are lot of Wall Street people there. It’s like a 40 minute commute on the train into New York. Suddenly, all over the news is how Wall Street is bad. Evil, evil, greed, greed, but that’s who make up this community and there are a lot of decent people there. How did we get so far off? I agree with you. I don’t believe in a lot of Darth Vaders. I think there are ultimately some very evil people, we could probably name a few, but most are more in a gray area and that’s what I find interesting.
CK: The first time I watched the film, I wasn’t sure if Mike’s ultimate punishment really fit his actions. I’ve changed my mind about that, but how did you find the line where he gets what he deserves but the story doesn’t end on a total bummer?
TM: Honestly? Most people get away with it. Even when they’re found guilty. On Wall Street right now, who’s being punished? Nobody. I know those families. I know those husbands and those wives and they’re back. They’re back. They’re pulling in big money, they’re buying new houses. They’re back. The blip was… I don’t think they feel bad about it.
With Mike, I wanted to skirt that line where he doesn’t totally get what he deserves, but at the same time the greatest punishment is getting caught out in your society. That means by his wife, by his friends, by his kids, by this young man. When you hear about all these shameful things that are happening, that is the thing that resonates most. Money comes and goes. People that play with money know that, but when you are no longer thought of as a decent person, which is really how Mike makes his money and his practice, I have a feeling he’ll feel the long term effects of that. That to me is more powerful and more painful. The look his wife gives him – a woman he’s obviously very much in love with and really does a lot of the things he does, albeit misguidedly, for her and for his family – it’s that kind of judgment that I think is worse than even Margo Martindale (as Mike’s colleague) hits him with in court at the end and she hits him pretty hard. Reputation is everything. Most men feel that way on some level even if they can’t necessarily put their finger on it. Even if they attribute it to career, or financial success, or a beautiful wife, to me it’s still about their integrity. That is a difficult thing to repair once it’s damaged.
Paul does this great thing. The morning after Mike comes home, he’s like a stranger in his own house. He doesn’t come bursting in and into the kitchen. He sort of comes in and shuts the door like a kid in trouble and he knows he’s in trouble. I think that feeling – and we’ve all been there in some capacity where suddenly what was so comfortable now isn’t because of something we’ve done – suddenly you just want things to be like they were but it’s not going to be like that.
CK: What’s interesting too is that Mike feels guilty, yet at the same time he clings to a little bit of resentment. He’s being judged by the woman for whom he’s done these terrible things. That’s very human.
TM: I think there is that, but that’s not an excuse. That’s something I was really interested in exploring with this movie also, that just because you have a family and just because you go to church or temple or whatever you do and you have kids and a wife and you seem like a decent guy, none of that is an excuse for making these sort of decisions. I think that’s tricky for people. We see it a lot in the business world and in the political world. “Oh he’s a decent guy. He’s got all the accoutrements of an upstanding member of society” But he’s not. I was interested in exploring just how that happens.
CK: You also let his wife Jackie played by Amy Ryan be a fully rounded character. At first she seems like she’s just going to be the moral boundary, but there’s that great scene where she’s comparing tattoos with Kyle and reminiscing about her days as a Jersey girl Bon Jovi fan. Suddenly you see her character in a different light. She’s a mom, but she wasn’t always.
TM: What I love about Amy’s character and the way Amy played it is you do see this progression. First she’s very resistant to the idea of letting this young man stay in her basement. That kind of fear, there’s something very clan-like about certain parts of the country. There’s this clan mentality of very strong pockets of community and when you’re an outsider, you’re an outsider and when you’re in, you’re in. I think she is resistant to shaking up what they have, but when that kid gets to her and she sees the trouble he’s in, then she flips. She’s not just immediately altruistic. That seems honest to me and I like Amy’s progression through the whole movie. She flips again at the end when Mike comes home and he says “I’ve gotta come clean about this.” She’s not like, “Yeah, you do,” instead she’s like, “Maybe not. Maybe you don’t come clean because who’s gonna know?” She’s protecting her family, but you watch that scene again between those two and you can see Mike going “Oh, God. It’s gotten this bad. Now this woman is ready to lie too.” You see how insidious this whole thing is and it’s another progression of her character.
CK: You’ve said you wrote the part of Jackie with Amy in mind.
TM: We literally lived in the same neighborhood for years and I’d see her on stage and do readings with her and then I started seeing her movie career take off. Amy was one of those actors who was like a journeywoman actor. Blue collar. She was always good and then in the last three or four years she’s really started to make a name for herself in film and to many of us it’s like “Good. One of the good people.” It’s long overdue and she deserves everything she gets. She’s a true pro and just a great person. Sometimes the good people do win. Her and Paul are both at the top of their games right now.
CK: Alongside these seasoned professionals, you’ve got young Alex Schaffer who has never acted before. You’ve said you were more concerned with getting a kid who is a convincing wrestler and you weren’t too worried about the acting, but that’s pretty risky isn’t it? If the character Kyle doesn’t work emotionally, the movie could fall apart. It seems like a lot to ask of someone who has never acted.
TM: My actor sense was that this role as written on the page was reachable for a non-actor and that I just had to find the right kid who could tap into where Kyle was at; how he responds or doesn’t respond. The pitfall would be making Kyle seem flat or letting him flatline. Those kids don’t flatline, they just seem shut down and shut off. Their hormones are raging and they’re going through changes, but guys of a certain age have that “too cool for school” approach where they act like they don’t hear you, but you know they do. They hear everything. So that was the trick and finding Alex for that was not an easy job.
CK. It’s one thing being that kid, but another thing playing that kid on screen. How big was the learning curve for Alex?
TM: It was huge. We auditioned him probably 7 or 8 times. We had him back and back and I was using that time to have him work with my friend Jackie Brogan who is someone I work very closely with when I’m developing my films at a script level, kind of a close collaborator over the years, and she’s also an acting coach. I had her work with Alex, push him here, push him there to see where he could go over the three or four week casting period. We had to vet the kid. We didn’t have to get him there, we just had to know that he was growing, that he was learning and then if we felt like he had an aptitude for this, then we knew we could deal with [his lack of experience].
I had faith in myself and Jackie and faith in the other actors which is key. I knew I had really good actors who were generous and they get that actors are only as good as everyone else around them. They’re selfless. Paul and Amy and Bobby [Cannavale, who plays Mike’s friend Terry] get that and early on it was clear with Alex that he gets it too. Then he’s like a pitcher in the dugout who’s pitching a good game and you don’t talk to him because you don’t want to make him aware of it. Alex was wonderfully unaware.
CK: He reminded me of a younger, little bit softer Sean Penn. He could Spicoli’s younger brother from Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
TM: Yeah totally, but dialed down. He totally has that weird affect and he just brought that. I got a call one day from Allison [Estrin, a casting associate on Win Win] and she said “You have to look at this one kid. Watch his pre-audition tape,” and I saw him and just his cadence, his rhythm of speaking is kind of laid back. It just really meshed well with the character immediately as written and I thought, “Ok, we’re in the ballpark. He’s gonna take to this.” He’s got kind of a funny deadpan delivery that just works for the character. But you’re right. We had to do it right because if the kid didn’t work, the movie wasn’t going to work.
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Luckily for Tom and for us, the kid works and so does Win Win. Here’s hoping it’s remembered.