The Winner

Wayne (The Great Man Theory) disappoints with this underheated thriller about a tennis pro’s love triangle. Connor O’Toole promises John Price, a man he met at the Manhattan tennis club where he used to work, free lessons in exchange for summer lodging in Price’s Cape Cod guesthouse. Connor struggles to drum up additional clients until Catherine, an attractive divorcée in Price’s neighborhood, shows interest. Soon, she offers Connor double his rate to take their sessions to the bedroom. Their arrangement works well enough until Connor meets and falls for Emily, an aspiring writer his own age, and struggles to balance his pursuit of her with Catherine’s increasingly possessive demands. Everything comes to a head when a tragic act of violence forces Connor to take desperate measures. Wayne’s prose teeters on the precipice between stirring and overwrought (“He awoke for his tennis lesson... under the black cloud of having escaped the action of a nightmare but not its lingering disquietude”), and the pacing is lethally slow, without sufficient atmosphere to offset the lack of action. In the end, this slow burn fails to generate much heat. (May)