While featured player Paul Giamatti is convincing as a suburbanite attorney who, in struggling to make ends meet, devises an ethically dodgy plan to take on the legal guardianship of a senile elderly client (Burt Young), the key move that put this film on a winning track, came when writer/director Tom McCarthy (“The Station Agent”, “The Visitor”) decided to audition wrestlers that had acting potential.
As we all know, authenticity of a given motion picture’s sports action scenes are mandatory in these days of 24/7 media for the credibility of the story as a whole.
After responding to an ad in a local paper and a multiple series of reads, New Jersey teenager Alex Shaffer, a state wrestling champion, won the part of Kyle, a troubled teen who runs away from his junkie mother to visit his grandfather (Young) and gets taken in by Flaherty (Giamatti) and his wife (Amy Ryan.)
Flaherty, who also moonlights as a local high school wrestling coach, encourages the young man’s natural wrestling talents. But in the end, Flaherty cannot escape cleanly from his shady business dealing and must pay a price.
A finely observed tale of people trying to connect, “Win Win”, is a bright spot for movies that use real wrestling as a backdrop (though as far as “fake” wrestling, I do like “The Wrestler”).
There’s not a lot of depth among the cinematic feature titles connected to this sport, but if someone tried to pin me down as to what I feel the best wrestling film of all-time is, I’d probably go with Jules Dassin’s 1950 noirish gem, “Night and The City”.
In this dark tale of blind ambition, self-deception and broken dreams, Richard Widmark is riveting as Harry Fabian, a small-time London hustler from America with dreams of hitting the big time as a wresting promoter. 
Fabian, a desperately hungry fish in a sea of sharks, thinks nothing of robbing his long-suffering lady which he does while hiding out in the apartment of his girlfriend, Mary Bristol (Gene Tierney), to help bankroll his doomed schemes.
Believing he’s outsmarted all the big shots in his seedy world, Harry (”an artist without an art”), ends up getting into trouble he can’t get escape from when he inevitably fails to deliver on his promises to powerful “businessmen”.
“You’ve got it all, but you’re a dead man Harry Fabian, a dead man.”
