On Movies: For McCarthy, 'Win Win' a hometown effort

Never mind what

Thomas Wolfe

says - you

can

go home again. It's just that in

Tom McCarthy's

case, it took 25 years.

Win Win, the third feature written and directed by the industrious character actor, is set in New Providence, N.J., the burg where McCarthy grew up and was a varsity wrestler in high school.

Conceived with Joe Toboni, his friend and New Providence High teammate, Win Win is the story of a small-town lawyer - another ace Paul Giamatti performance - who coaches the school's wrestling squad and commits an ethical lapse that impacts not only his career, but also his wife (Amy Ryan) and their two daughters. The smartly modulated comedy-drama, a hit at the Sundance Film Festival in January, opens Friday at the Ritz Five and Rave Motion Pictures at the Ritz Center/NJ.

"My friend Joe is a small-town lawyer who lives in the town he grew up in, married with two girls - so you can see the parallels," says McCarthy, who has long been based in New York and whose previous feature ventures are the terrific, and terrifically received, The Station Agent and The Visitor. "I literally called Joe up one day to laugh about my idea of making a wrestling movie . . . and by the end of our conversation I said, 'Why don't you develop this with me?' "

Although much of the research and writing was done in New Providence, which is in North Jersey, Win Win ended up being shot on Long Island - a cost-saving move spurred by tax breaks. But the setting and the signage remain as written, and the spirit of the town, if not the town itself, is there.

"I just started spending a lot of time in New Providence as we were realizing the project," says McCarthy, on a recent Philadelphia visit. "My parents live there, my brother lives there, my sister moved back to the town next door. . . . I was like many young people who probably couldn't wait to get out of there.

"To try to be who I thought I needed to be, or wanted to be, I felt I had to go in a different direction. But now, I think I'm at the age where coming back was interesting, and I could see the beauty in the lives of people who were setting up there, including my friend Joe. His practice is in a house, just like the house you see in the movie, just down the street from the high school and the nursing home, just like you see in the movie."

Pivotal to the events in Win Win is the appearance of a transfer student who happens to be a wrestling natural. The kid has come to New Providence to seek out his grandfather and leave his messed-up mother behind in the Midwest. Giamatti's character takes him under his wing, and good things and bad ensue. Because the wrestling matches are key to the movie's narrative, McCarthy knew from the outset that he had to find a young wrestler who could act, rather than a young actor who could learn the sport.

Out of almost a hundred kids, McCarthy and his casting directors found Alex Shaffer, who hails from Hunterdon Central High and was declared 119-pound New Jersey state wrestling champion just before shooting on the film was to begin.

"Alex didn't have the [acting] ability right away, quite honestly," McCarthy says, recalling the casting and audition sessions. "He came in seven or eight times. And some of those times I had a camera and I filmed him, to see how he responds. And then I put him with Paul and with Amy . . . and just really vetted him, because if he doesn't work, then the film doesn't work, it was as simple as that. . . . And he responded. And it was about wrestling - the thing the kid likes more than anything in the world. It was the perfect storm for him for a first-time experience."

Although McCarthy has known Giamatti since they attended the Yale School of Drama in the early '90's, this is the first time he has worked on a film with the John Adams and Sideways star.

"Paul is like a great athlete - he makes it look easy," says McCarthy, whose own acting work includes turns in Fair Game, Duplicity, and Good Night, and Good Luck. "You don't see the work. It's almost hard to learn from him. But that said, he takes it very seriously, he's a very focused guy, you can just tell by his questions and his insight . . . .

"And he's a bull, he just keeps going. He was in just about every frame of this thing, which is hard. This is not a super-comfy movie, let's be honest. And he just never, ever flinched. He never lost it or had a meltdown."

McCarthy, 45, is an Oscar-nominated writer - not for The Station Agent or The Visitor, but for Pixar's 2009 megahit, Up. He collaborated on the animated film with its co-directors, Pete Docter and Bob Peterson.

"It was very liberating because I didn't have any sense of ego or ownership. It was just, like, I trust these guys, I like these guys . . . and I'm here to help make the project as good as I can."

So McCarthy went to San Francisco to work on the film. "And then when I left there I conceived, wrote, directed, finished, and then released The Visitor - and Up came out a year later! The Pixar timetable is a little more complicated than mine."

That lengthy timeline probably had something to do with why McCarthy wasn't tuned to his TV set on the morning the Academy Award nominations were announced.

"I didn't even know I was nominated until Pete called me," McCarthy recalls, chuckling. "I was going to the gym, my girlfriend was sleeping, and I had a text, 'Congratulations!' . . . I didn't know what the congratulations were for, and then I got a call from Pete. . . . I tried to cover, and he said, 'You had no idea, did you? This is your first Oscar nomination, right?'

"And I said, 'Yep,' and I felt really stupid. We laughed about it. And then I got a flood of calls."