Sweet and Funny and Full of Great Values

Rating: 10/10 (25 August 2011)

Director Tom McCarthy said in an interview that he can't stand sports movies in which the actors can't play the sport, which is why he chose Alex Shaffer, a state champion wrestler, to play the part of Kyle. Win Win is definitely what you would call a character-driven movie, not that it is lacking in story, but without the performances of the principal actors it wouldn't have amounted to much of a film. Fine acting and some precision dialogue lift this movie well above the formulaic mediocrity filling most of the theaters at the mall mega-cineplex.
At first Kyle seems like a typical maladjusted, teenage misfit but we quickly see that there is a lot more depth to him than his rough exterior of monosyllabic speech, dyed hair and cigarettes. "He's probably on drugs," one character remarks. Before we see that Kyle is some sort of prodigy on the wrestling mat we see that he is basically a fine boy: polite, sweet, honest, very hard-working, etc.
The movie is billed as a comedy and it is, but what drew me in was that it's also incredibly sweet. Kyle is just such a great kid. He's is what you would want your kids to be like. He's who I wish that I could have been more like in high school, a better version of myself, a better version of most people. This is all apart from the fact that the kid happens to be a bad-ass grappler. Although not really a sports movie, there are enough scenes of wrestling to probably qualify it for the genre, and there are certainly a lot of laughs to file it under comedy, Win Win is more sweet than anything. Add that to its other qualities and you have a pretty good little movie in my book.