The poster features Paul Giamatti and his young co-star Alex Shaffer. The publicity photos are really no different with a couple adding writer/director Tom McCarthy (The Station Agent, The Visitor) to the mix. The one picture featuring my favorite aspect of McCarthy’s Win Win is directly above… Amy Ryan.
Ryan earned a lot of attention four years ago with her drug-addicted performance as Helene in Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone, a role that eventually earned her an Oscar nomination. I haven’t been as impressed by one of her performances until now. Ryan blows the doors off in Win Win with a maternal performance that takes the familial aspect of Win Win to another level. It’s certainly the first performance that stuck with me out of all the films I’ve seen so far this year that I would consider worthy of an Oscar nomination.
While Ryan may be under-represented on the poster and in the publicity stills she dominates the available clips from the film, featured in all but one of the seven Fox Searchlight has made available. I didn’t want to ruin the film by including all seven here, and fortunately my favorite moment with her from the end of the film is not online or I may have been tempted to put it up here even though there is no way it would carry as much weight without everything that comes before it.
In Win Win Paul Giamatti plays a struggling attorney who also spends his after work hours coaching the high school wrestling team. Hoping to keep the fact his business isn’t doing so well from his wife (Ryan) he volunteers to serve as the legal guardian for a rich elderly client only to put him in a retirement home against his wishes and collect on the duties he’s supposed to be performing. This, however, results in a sticky situation when his client’s grandson shows up out of the blue sending he and his family’s lives on a peculiar ride, echoing what it truly means to be a family.
I will be droning on longer about Win Win in my review on Friday, but for now I wanted to give you a peek at Ryan’s performance and the film in general if you should be so inclined. Win Win is getting a limited release this Friday in only five theaters and I am praying it expands more than Searchlight’s last good film (and one of the best films of this so far, short year), Cedar Rapids, which has so far managed a whopping 394 theaters.
As far as the clips below are concerned, I’d say “JBJ” may be my favorite on its own, but that’s just a small suggestion.
