Residents Receive Sneak Peek of Sundance Film Festival Movie

Main Line residents packed the Bryn Mawr Film Institute on Sunday morning to get a sneak peak of "Win Win," a film which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last month and has not yet been released to theaters.

"Win Win," a comedy directed and written by Tom McCarthy and starring Paul Giamatti, Amy Ryan, Jeffrey Tambor and Burt Young, was brought to the Bryn Mawr Film Institute as part of Talk Cinema, a series of independent and foreign films which subscribers get to preview in their entirety before the films’ general release.

Talk Cinema, which screens films at 12 locations around the country, is curated by Harlan Jacobson, a journalist and film critic with 30 years of experience.  Jacobson, a graduate of Haverford College who resides in Westchester, N.Y., founded Talk Cinema with his wife Susan Jacobson in 1992.

“I loved it,” Judith Singh of Malvern, said of "Win Win" as she was leaving the theater after the film.  “It was moving, yes.  Hilarious.  Very real life.”

From the opening line of the film "Win Win," there was laughter from the audience and a feeling of familiarity, as if the viewer had just woken up in her own home.

Not a Hollywood-perfect home where everything is right, but a regular middle class home, where a little girl awakens to the sound of her light-catcher falling to the floor, and as she picks up the broken pieces, she shocks the audience by uttering the expletive "sh** ."

Stephen Schaefer, a film critic who contributes to the Boston Herald and writes for Variety, led a discussion about the film after it ended.  He pointed out that the opening line is "sh**" and the film’s’ characters utter the same expletive three more times at the beginning of the movie.

“It is not so much an expletive but the state of things,” Schaefer said, explaining that the word symbolically sets up what is to come in the film.

In the movie, Paul Giamatti plays Mike Flaherty, a New Jersey lawyer who works with elderly clients.  A married father of two young girls, Mike is struggling to keep his law practice afloat in the tough economy and is coaching a losing high school wrestling team.

Mike has no money to hire someone to fix the plumbing problems at his business (leaving him to plunge his own office toilet as it repeatedly backs up.  Here again is the recurring theme from the film’s first scene).  He’s having panic attacks about his financial struggles but keeping the problems from his wife, Jackie (played by Amy Ryan of NBC’s comedy The Office, and the film "Gone Baby Gone") because he doesn’t want to burden her.

And so Mike agrees to become the legal guardian for one of his elderly clients.  He takes the job because he needs the money and is trying to do the right thing, but he lies to the judge and puts his client Leo Poplar (played by Burt Young of the "Rocky" films) in a nursing home rather than keeping him in his own home.   It is a lie he struggles with throughout the movie.

“He’s a loving father, a faithful husband, and he makes a mistake and he has to live with it,” Schaefer said of Giamatti’s character Mike.

Life becomes even more complicated when Leo’s grandson Kyle (played by newcomer Alex Shaffer) shows up to live with Leo, and Mike and Jackie take Leo in to live with them and compete on Mike’s high school wrestling team.

“I think if there’s a theme in McCarthy’s film, it’s ordinary people get thrown together by circumstance and bond as a nuclear family,”  Schaefer said during the discussion he led after the film.

Schaefer praised the acting of the entire cast, especially Alex Shaffer, who he said is a real-life New Jersey state wrestling champion who had never acted before appearing in "Win Win."

Talk Cinema Curator Harlan Jacobson, who attended the Bryn Mawr screening of "Win Win," said he chose to include the film in the spring season series of Talk Cinema after “I saw it at Sundance at its world premiere screening.”

“I love that it’s a very contemporary family that’s in a patch of economic difficulty,” Jacobson said in an interview after the film and the discussion.

Jacobson said he views "Win Win" as an updated version of the classic film "It’s a Wonderful Life."

“I loved the characters,” Jacobson said. “They really charmed me.  The characters reached out to outsiders, even in the worst of circumstances.”

The film’s characters made for a lively discussion between audience members. 

The audience debated whether the characters were intimate and affectionate with each other.  They disagreed about whether Giamatti’s character Mike was open with his wife, and one man said he thought Mike was “lazy” because he didn’t work past 3 p.m. when wrestling got out.

Other attendees disagreed, pointing out that Mike had anxiety attacks induced by stress, and was helping elderly people in his law practice and helping kids as a wrestling coach, which appeared to be a volunteer position.

As audience members left the theater, they had mostly praise for the film, which drew laughter throughout its screening. 

Judy Chance of Bryn Mawr said she could identify with the characters in "Win Win."           

“I enjoyed it very much,”  Chance said of the film. “ Number one, I love Paul Giamatti and Amy Ryan.  I could relate to what they (Giamatti and Ryan’s characters) were going through.”

Ed Kane of West Chester, Pa., said that while he enjoyed the movie, it also reminded him of another film of which he could not remember the name.

“Well, we liked the movie a lot,” Kane said.  “There was a lot of humor, a little pathos.  I don’t feel like it was a completely original idea.”

Some Talk Cinema subscribers who were at the film said they do not typically know what film they will be viewing until they arrive at the theater, while others said they received an e-mail from the Bryn Mawr Film Institute announcing the name of the film about two days before the show.

"Win Win" was the second of seven films in Talk Cinema’s spring series.  The films are shown at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute on Sundays at 10 a.m.

In addition to purchasing a subscription to the series, the public may buy tickets at the door on the day of the show or win tickets through Talk Cinema.  For more information about Bryn Mawr Film Institute or Talk Cinema, visit brynmawrfilm.org or talkcinema.com.