Hollywood is hardly friendly territory for Main Street America. More often than not, big budget films throw in a non-sequitur evil corporate villain or rogue military officer. Certainly Hollywood films never portray regular people overcoming their challenges by applying morality and sacrifice. With the backdrop of the Hollywood agenda, the new film Win-Win is a refreshing story of individual and family triumph in the face of a public system that is powerless to solve life’s real problems.

Paul Giamatti (John Adams) plays flailing Mike Flaherty who is plagued with all manner of life’s troubles – a family to feed, a health insurance bill he can’t mail for lack of money, and a small law practice that he barely keeps open. The world is crushing Mike, yet he soldiers on, taking on broke but sympathetic clients, raising his family, and even volunteering as the local high school’s wrestling coach. Mike suffers from panic attacks and calms them with secreted cigarettes behind a dumpster. Playing an old time hero, Mike complains to nobody.

Mike is surrounded by people who don’t appreciate his struggles. Mike’s wife, played by Amy Ryan (The Wire, The Office), is willfully ignorant of the family’s precarious finances. Mike’s friend Terry provides comic relief but also represents a soulless indifference to Mike’s values. Terry is far wealthier than Mike, yet his only advice is that Mike should somehow cheat the system to get his share. Terry’s selfish petulance represents the cheap side of society and is an ideal foil and contrast to everyman Mike.

Spoiler Alert – This section gives away the plot

Mike reluctantly takes his friend’s advice by fraudulently taking on a State’s ward and pocketing the monthly stipend without doing any actual work. Mike uses the extra money to pay the family bills, and his scam goes unnoticed until the ward’s grandson Kyle appears, fleeing his own abusive home life. Despite Mike’s precarious finances, he takes Kyle in. Kyle has been failed by public services, yet he is turned around by a stable family environment. Kyle enrolls in school, quits smoking, and joins Mike’s wrestling team. Kyle verges on the trite Hollywood conceit of an adolescent that is wiser than his handlers (think Juno), but the film steps back just before insulting the audience’s common sense.

Eventually, Kyle’s addict mother gets wind of Mike’s scam and demands her share. Mike is unprepared for dishonesty’s side effect – having to deal with other dishonest people who are more ruthless and experienced. Mike can save his scam by returning Kyle to the old abusive environment that was ruining him. Mike is faced with a moral dilemma: sacrifice Kyle, a virtual stranger, to a failed life, or lose the financial lifeline that was holding his own fragile life together. Mike makes the moral choice and gives up his scam to keep Kyle in a safe home. What started out as a trick to get a little extra money ended with no money and an extra mouth to feed. Mike takes a second job as a bartender.

End of Spoiler Alert

What makes Win-Win special is that its hero does not fit any of the Hollywood stereotypes. Mike is nothing special; he is every person who works to fulfill his obligations to his family. The fate of western society does not rest on Mike’s shoulders, yet the fate of society does rest on the shoulders of an army of Mikes. The government and the slick side of society failed everybody in Win-Win, and the only thing that saved Kyle’s future was boring anti-Hollywood themes like individual responsibility, honesty, and the value of family.

Win-Win proves that films can engage without bashing regular life or aggrandizing hipsters and socially aware coffee shop patrons. Win-Win is not exciting, to be sure; there are no gunfights or over-the-top shouting matches. Win-Win could be anybody’s life, and thereby it offers insight into real life. Win-Win champions the family over government, individual morality over avarice, and the power of the everyman to be a real world hero.

It is no secret that Hollywood loves the Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro and his fellow socialist dictators such as Hugo Chavez and Manuel Zelaya. Hollywood pillars like Sean Penn, Michael Moore, and Oliver Stone gush over the humid paradises these dictators have built. Perhaps they should hear the story of Juan Hernández Nodar who spent over thirteen years as the political prisoner of Castro. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, Hernández Nodar was convicted of trying to free Cuban baseball players from Cuba to play in the US.

Hernández Nodar was essentially accused of stealing the property of Cuba in the form of its best baseball players. The mere fact that Cuba has such a law proves that it is a prison and all of its inhabitants are effectively slaves. How shameful of Misters Penn, Moore, and Stone to align themselves with such a criminal as Castro.

Hollywood might claim that Hernández Nodar knew that visiting Cuba for the purpose of recruiting baseball players was illegal. Hernández Nodar knew the risk, but his supposed greed entangled him in a crime for which he was convicted. Well, no. Although often misrepresented, the rights discussed in the Constitution are natural rights owned by every person on the planet, not just US citizens. The Constitution does not grant rights, it states that the Government may not take them away. Mr. Hernández Nodar had the natural right to transact with the Cuban baseball players, and they had the natural right to leave Cuba for better prospects. The criminal was Castro for stealing the rights of his subjects.

Even ignoring the fact that Castro runs his island like a prison, the fact that Hernández Nodar spent thirteen years in hell points to political oppression. Thirteen years for simply meeting with people to introduce them to better employment abroad? No, the true crime was undermining Castro’s dictatorship and power. Every successful athlete or businessperson who escapes Cuba is a black eye to Castro and his sham socialist paradise.

Amazingly, Hernández Nodar appears unbroken in his interview. He has returned to recruiting Cubans, albeit from the Dominican Republic, and his will to help Cubans achieve their potential remains strong.

So, the next time Penn, Moore, or Stone puts out an anti-US screed that paints businessmen as evil, the US Military as terrorists, and capitalism as modern slavery, consider what these men offer as an alternative. Hollywood may idolize Castro but his works tell another story: an island prison where a political prisoner suffered for over thirteen years for the crime of encouraging baseball players to achieve their dreams.