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YOU CAN COUNT ON ME
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From its opening credits, which linger lovingly on the green-carpeted Catskill Mountains and the nineteenth-century brick storefronts that line downtown Scottville, NY, YOU CAN COUNT ON ME establishes that it is a Small Film about Ordinary People. Sammy (Samantha) Prescott (Laura Linney) has lived her whole life in bucolic Scottville and is now so firmly rooted that moving is inconceivable.
Eighteen years ago, her parents were killed in a head-on truck collision, leaving older sister Sammy head of the shattered household. Now she lives in the family home, its furnishings out of date and its plumbing idiosyncratic, and works as lending officer for a backwater branch of Outback Savings Bank to support herself and her eight-year-old son Rudy (Cory, the newest and last Culkin), her only reminder of a disastrous relationship. Meanwhile her ne'er-do-well younger brother Terry (Mark Ruffalo), chafing against the small-town boundaries, wanders America, a Kerouac out of time: working in Alaska, doing brief jail time in Florida, and picking bar fights in Auburn, NY. Now Terry is back -- broke, asking for money as he always does -- and he moves back in to the family house, where in a rakish way he fills the absent-father role that Rudy Junior needs.
Small movies are about acting and small true moments, in which this film abounds. Linney (TALES OF THE CITY, THE TRUMAN SHOW, PRIMAL FEAR) has always had the radiant face of a homespun saint. Here she is always engaging, even when in the wrong, self-deluded, or bewildered by her brother and her son. Terry is an infuriating mix of behavioral problems: charming and infuriating by turns, a perennially apologetic fuckup, the kind of brother you love to death when he is absent and want to clock into next Tuesday within thirty seconds of his company. As the world's worst bank manager, feckless martinet Brian Everett, Matthew Broderick provides a marvelously exasperating foil for Linney's jumbled emotions, driving everyone to distraction with his edicts about daily time sheets and resetting computer monitors to "more sober color palettes".
Writer-director Lonergan, who like so many auteurs takes a small role himself (based on his flat, unaffected delivery, Nancy spotted him in five seconds), has a sure way with staging and script and gets fine performances from his actors. But he has the annoying tic of cutting away just at the moment scenes rise to genuine emotional confrontation, preferring instead to jump to the next talky encounter. (What is it with eating in small movies? Is the cast perpetually starved? Every third scene is set around a food table. Nancy and I notice these things because we see movies before walking off to a nice restaurant dinner, but in this film we reached the point of commenting to each other about the incessant eating.)
Our carping about food notwithstanding, YOU CAN COUNT ON ME is well worth seeing and savoring for the complex, credible, appealing relationship between sister and brother who will never understand one another but will always know and love one another. "You know what we always said to each other," Terry tells Laura, and they embrace. He does not say, because they know, and by movie's end, we know.