Thomas McCarthy’s thing seems to be scooping together unlikely strangers. In The Station Agent it was the loner title character, a gregarious hot dog vendor, and a depressed artist. In The Visitor, it was a depressed professor and a pair of illegal immigrants. Here, it’s Paul Giamatti and a runaway teenager. Giamatti’s character here is not depressed. He’s just been getting panic attacks lately, due no doubt to a struggling legal practice. He specializes in poor elderly clients. He and his wife (Amy Ryan) have a family to support.
And it’s these circumstances that lead him into some shaky ethical territory as well as into the path of the young man who might also be able to help out with the inept high school wrestling team he also coaches. (Jeffrey Tambor plays his assistant.) In his other two films, McCarthy carves paths of connection for his lonely male main characters. This one, on the other hand, plays out the main character’s internal struggles, not only about his treatment of a client with mild dementia (Burt Young) but also about how to deal with the unexpected arrival of the man’s grandson.
McCarthy handles this with a lot of humor, deft plotting, and a minimum of preachiness. Anyone who liked his other movies should like this one too, but the pacing is probably a little faster. It has strong characters and good acting—wrestler-turned-actor (Alex Shaffer) gives off a nice laid-back vibe as the young man who quietly seethes with anger toward the mother he ran away from. Bobby Cannavale, The Station Agent’s extroverted snack-cart vendor, plays a more suburbanized version of the same character. The men get most of the screen time, but Melanie Lynskey’s fairly brief role as the mother allows her a lot of range. Yet the film is not as self-conscious a character study as The Station Agent or The Visitor, and so might appeal to a wider audience.
IMDB link
viewed 4/27/11 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 5/3/11
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