Technical fall

Win Win

Crit

I was aware that the weight limits had been refined since I was covering the Grafton High School Bearcats wrestling team in West Virginia almost 3 decades ago--a team coached by (I am not making this up) Orville Wright. (Incidentally, here's something occupying memory space in my brain that could, in theory, be devoted to something useful: early-'80s high school weights? 98, 105, 112, 119, 126, 132, 138, 145, 155, 167, 185, and heavyweight [technically called "unlimited"].) What I didn't know, but trust to be true, and not just something tossed in for purposes of plot, is that a match no longer proceeds from the lowest weight through heavy but rather starts at a weight chosen at random--a clever and significant improvement.

So what about the movie? Well, you know what a fan I am of Tom McCarthy as a director, and what's good here is very good, not least the performance of the young real-life state wrestling champion Alex Shaffer, whose deadpan genuineness made me think of a young Sean Penn (Spicoli minus the haze, as it were). But I had serious problems with the inciting incident of the story, wherein the protagonist, an idealistic lawyer played by Paul Giamatti, does something grotesquely unethical (and significantly immoral and almost certainly illegal as well) for money, something that nothing else we see of his character suggests that he'd be capable of. And then, after he spends about 5 screen minutes late having to be apologetic and ashamed in front of everyone whose opinion matters, everything turns out all right. Plenty to like, but finally disappointing.

Trailer

• Snow Flower and the Secret Fan--Golly, looks schmaltzy.