Family
Values
YOU CAN
COUNT ON ME
A Little Slice of Life Succeeds Beautifully.
With Laura Linney, Mark Ruffalo, Matthew Broderick
Written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan
SOMETIMES YOU JUST NEED a little movie like You Can Count on Me, the story of a 30ish woman and her slightly younger brother who lost their parents in a car crash when they were kids. Now they're adults with divergent lives, and when the roving Terry (Mark Ruffalo) comes back to small-town upstate New York to visit single mom Sammy (Laura Linney) and 8-year-old Rudy (Rory Culkin), the family naturally comes to a reckoning.
Although writer/director Kenneth Lonergan speckles his movie with reassuring Hallmark moments, he mostly tries to endow the troubles of the Prescott family with just enough of an edge to elevate it above TV movie fare. Whether he succeeds will depend upon your own definition of realism and your taste for bittersweet.
His writing is never mundane and only occasionally refined, so most of his script gives you a sense of danger and conflict without losing sight of the fact that things in life usually work out, one way or another. Nonetheless, toward the end he relies too much on tiresome plot twists, although he brings his story to an unusually realistic and satisfying conclusion.
At its best, You Can Count on Me takes its time with its characters and situations, letting you appreciate the way basically decent people relate to one another in difficult situations. For Sammy, that means coping with Bob (Jon Tenney), the nice-looking fellow she stopped dating a year ago, and to whom she now turns for a casual evening of dinner, conversation and sex, all in time to relieve the baby sitter. She also has a problem on the job: Brian (Matthew Broderick), the exacting new manager at the bank where she works, wants to run their little branch as primly as the company's home office. So Brian orders Sammy to stop leaving work for 15 minutes every afternoon to meet her son at his school bus stop.
Meanwhile, Sammy's roguish brother Terry, who just spent three months in a Florida jail for a bar fight, returns to the backwater town he loathes to get money for his pregnant girlfriend. But Sammy persuades him to stay a while, and he bonds with nephew Rudy, who finally has another kid his own age to play with, even if that kid shaves twice a day. Terry, who has a good temperament but no focus, teaches Rudy all the bruising life lessons that his mother shelters him from, so of course the siblings argue other whether that's good for an 8-year-old. They come to no resolve, and neither does Lonergan, who lets each of them be right now and then.
What emerges from this strife is a comfortable middle ground: Take responsibility but have some fun, or get wild now and then but honor your commitments. When Sammy begins an affair with her slightly pathetic boss - she eventually realizes, in fact, that she sleeps with sad-sack men because she feels sorry for them - we see how living by a list of austere rules makes you go a little nuts when you finally break one of them. It all converges into a gently humanist view of spirituality and the purpose of our individual lives.
To underscore his casually told story, Lonergan uses a variety of music, from a twangy guitar and ironic country/pop ballads that set the mood nicely, to a moaning series of cello solos that make the drama feel too much like an art-house teeth-grinder. He directs his lead actors to appealing performances: Ruffalo combines a laconic manner with a rumpled charm; Broderick again shows his gift for painting lightly on a blank slate; and Linney, perhaps best know from The Truman Show, moves with ease from tragically sad to dryly funny, although perhaps we could have used a little more of the latter.