Won Before

The indie film Win Win is opening wide this week. Its director, Tom McCarthy, and its star, Paul Giamatti, both studied acting at the Yale School of Drama in the mid-90s, and I have indelible memories of each of them.
As Duke Orsino, McCarthy provided exquisite framing moments for one of the best Twelfth Nights I’ve ever seen, directed for the Yale Rep with an all-YSD cast in 1995. In the very first second of the show, McCarthy burst up gasping from an deep tank of water at the front of the stage. At the very end, he had a charming small moment which still makes me chuckle; after Sebastian and Viola were revealed to be twins, McCarthy’s Duke started to converse with Sebastian, then made a shocked face suggesting that he’d mistaken the young man for Viola. That the actors playing the siblings were about as un-identical as they could be (a pit of incredulity which gapes in all productions of Twelfth Night ever) only added to the hilarity of this perfect little routine, which was mingled into a full-cast party scene. I saw the production several times, and those McCarthy moments still dazzled even once they felt familiar.
I saw Paul Giamatti in over a dozen shows during his time at the Yale School of Drama. (He’d also been undergrad at Yale. I can’t recall seeing any of his work then, but he used to browse for hours at a small bookshop I managed near campus.) I recall lamenting that he’d be forever stuck in character actor parts once he started making movies; his earliest roles were as the guy snogging his girlfriend in a diner in Cameron Crowe’s singles, the blustery radio exec Pig Vomit in the Howard Stern bio Private Parts. Despite having made inroads into indie films and a few blockbusters, he was still doing the blustering businessman idiot routine in Big Fat Liar in 2002. Any typecasting would be a tragedy, I felt, having seen him nail the starring roles in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and Carlo Gozzi’s Love of Three Oranges, not to mention Jacques (the “All the world is a stage” utterer) in As You Like It plus a scad of Chekhovs (The Bear at the Yale Cabaret, The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull at the School of Drama). Ultimately, talent did out, and Giamatti got to be Harvey Pekar and John Adams and the Sideways guy and dozens of other roles he didn’t win on just his looks. The only struggle remaining now is to get the Motion Picture Academy to recognize his achievements.
I am not generally a fan of wrestling, or of films in which flawed adults mentor troubled teens, but Win Win seems to have a winning formula: McCarthy matched with Giamatti for the first time in 15 years.