Good for a laugh
PARK CITY, UTAH — Though the Sundance Film Festival certainly smiles on films about transna tional unrest, exploitation of the working class and generalized ennui, dyspepsia and despair, it also allows the occasional comedy to sneak in. In the first couple of days of this year’s fest, several crowd-pleasing laffers have already made their mark.
Perhaps the best of them so far is “Win Win,” starring an excellent Paul Giamatti in his patented sad-sack mode. This time he’s Mike, a struggling New Jersey lawyer with more unpaid bills than clients. As a hobby, he coaches the high school wrestling team and tries to ward off panic attacks on jogs with his obsessive and hilarious best friend (Bobby Cannavale), who has taken to hanging around outside his ex-house because it is still occupied by his ex-wife. An ethically shady arrangement involving an elderly client, who suffers from dementia, enables Mike to get his financial house in order. He isn’t proud of himself, but when you’ve got a gimlet-eyed, Jersey-girl wife (Amy Ryan) and two growing kids, you do what you have to. Everyone’s life unexpectedly perks up a bit when Mike finds himself acting as a kind of foster dad to his aged client’s grandson, who pops up needing a place to stay. Soon the teen is living in Mike’s cellar — and he turns out to be a top-notch wrestler.
“Win Win,” from writer-director Tom McCarthy, finds its laughs in the everyday and the familiar: There’s a daughter who swears too much and eats too little, an inept wrestler whose best move is to run around the perimeter of the ring avoiding capture by his rival, a woman who explains that the tattoo on her ankle from 20 years ago is a declaration of love for Jon Bon Jovi. The movie is heartfelt and sweet without being maudlin, a victory for all involved.
Lacking the character depth and moral quandaries of “Win Win,” “My Idiot Brother” is nevertheless another well-done comedy with feeling. Paul Rudd stars as Ned, a simple local farmer in the Catskills whose manchild naiveté and crazy plans (such as crossing an onion with a tomato) will instantly make you think of Cosmo Kramer, only with a beard like a Civil War general. Ned runs into a little law-enforcement issue because the world takes advantage of him, and after a stint behind bars he loses his home and has no choice but to take turns living with each of his three sisters in New York City. Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel and Emily Mortimer are all fine actresses who do their best not to allow their somewhat stereotypical characters to be bores. The sisters’ interactions with Ned lead, predictably, to comic catastrophe, but it’s still thoroughly amusing to see how Ned’s puppy-dog niceness keeps upending everything around him.
Playing for an older audience in the sentimental seriocomic style of “The Wonder Years” is the rock-nostalgia film “The Music Never Stopped,” which stars a terrific J.K. Simmons (“Spider-Man,” “Juno”) as a Bing Crosby-loving dad who, in the late ’60s, has a falling-out with his hippie son (Lou Taylor Pucci). The details of this rift emerge only gradually because as the film begins it is 1986, the two men haven’t spoken for 20 years and the son can’t remember anything that happened since the 1960s. Moreover, he can’t really even communicate except when rock music is played for him, in a process that seems to unclog his neural pathways, which were damaged by a benign brain tumor.
The movie is based on a case study by Oliver Sacks, the author of “Awakenings,” with which this one has much in common. This time, though, there are many comic elements as father and son try to rebuild their relationship — buttoned-down Dad is willing to become a Deadhead if that’s what it takes, and his boy takes his neurological problems in stride. The bright side, to him, is that at least Nixon is no longer president. “How time flies,” he says, “when you don’t have a brain.”
