The critics—including those on epinions—seem to me overenthusiastic about “You can count on me.” the directorial debut of Kenneth Lonergan (who wrote some of the alternately broad and witty “Analyze This” and “Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle” and has an interesting part as a non-judgmental spiritual advisor here). Three epinions movie advisors make strong cases for the film. There really is a lot to admire in the slice of small-town life film, and I (highly) recommend examining the opinions that are more favorable than mine.
Admittedly, what the film tries to do, it does very well. I’m not saying that what it does is easy, only that what it tries is not very much. (Compared to what? How about compared to a film with Tobey Maguire: Ice Storm, Pleasantville, Ride with the Devil, The Cider House Rules, or Wonder Boys. Or the other rural crash-aftermath drama, The Sweet Hereafter).
The two leads, Laura Linney (Tales of the City, The Truman Show) as Sammy and Mark Ruffalo (who played a small part in “Ride with the Devil”) as Terry turn in nuanced performances. The rolling hills are well photographed. Tthe mix of country-western music and Bach is unusual (if ubsubtle!). Still, the major different between this film and an episode of a David E. Kelly television series is that more happens in one of the latter. The mix of humor and pathos is not distinguishable from that on any number of tv series.
At the start, we see parents in a car at night. We have perhaps 2 — perhaps 30 — seconds to get to know them before their fatal crash. Then we glimpse the children watching television when a sheriff or deputy asks the baby-sitter outside to tell her what has happened. And that is it for the leading characters’ childhood incarnation. We have not a clue how they got along or what they were like either before or after the tragedy.
Next we have an inarticulate ne’re-do-well cadging money from his girlfriend to go visit his sister. At some point in the sister-brother reunion in the restaurant, I connected that these were the children whose parents died in the car crash from the first scene.
Sammy is the loan officer at the local bank and having to put up with a new bank manager/ petty tyrant (Brian), played by Matthew Broderick largely without his boyish charm. Terry has drifted around, recently from Alaska to Florida where he did some prison time resulting from a bar fight. When he explains why he was out of touch for a while, Sammy blows up (in public, in the restaurant).
I find it hard to believe
(1) that the very WASPy Linney and very Italian Ruffalo are siblings—there is no physical resemblance and they do not sound like they grew up in the same dialect region,
(2) that they love each other,
(3) that she is so desperate for her son to have an adult male around that she seriously thinks her brother is an adult, let alone possibly a good role model,
or (4) that someone so good at the repressions of living in the town where she grew up would blow up in public.
(While I'm at it, (5) I also find it hard to believe that Terry's libido is so completely hibernating throughout his stay!)
Sammy's eight-year-old son, Rudy. is terminally morose. One could easily believe that his whole family (not just a pair of grandparents) had been wiped out, leaving him to suffer on all alone. Rory Culkin totally lacks the glee that his (real-life) older brother Matthew displayed in “Home Alone,” and manages to look even more depressed than Lukas Haas did as “The Wizard of Loneliness.” Terry does get through to him by treating him as a peer. A good case could be made that Rudy is more mature than the uncle, so this is not too much of a stretch. Rudy and his mother need to loosen up, but Terry's life is not much of an invitation to doing so!
Speaking of lack of stretches, I think the film would have been more interesting if Ruffalo had played the stay-at-home, church-going, pillar of the community, and Linney had played the prodigal sister constantly having to apologize for having screwed up again. Linney shows (again) that beneath her bland blonde nice girl is a steely resolve and not much ability to judge suitable male partners (as in “Tales of the City”), but it would be more interesting to see her as the bad girl, or at least as a wild one. Similarly, it seems too easy for Ruffalo to play Terry. (Ditto Matthew Broderick’s Brian, especially Brian in lust). I am not saying that Ruffalo is playing himself. Probably he isn’t. It’s just that the light/dark parts are too easily assigned to the light-skinned and dark-skinned sibling. (BTW, rather than young Brando seems to me far more like a slightly bulkier James Dean. He's more articulate than either of them was, however.)
Conclusion
Although I thought the film was slow, if not slack, it is by no means a bad movie. It has many poignant and/or amusing moments and two complex, fully drawn characters played with total conviction. It is like “Nobody’s Fool” with lesser star-power. Unfortunately, it is not like “The Sweet Hereafter” or “Affliction,” looks at small-town lives (and post-traumatic stresses) that are more wintery — and not just in the season in which the exteriors were shot.
A brother and sister, orphaned at a young age, live in upstate N.Y. The divorced sister is very responsible with a young son. The brother is charming ...More at HotMovieSale.com
Winner of the Best Picture and Best Screenplay awards at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival, You Can Count On Me has been hailed as the best American mov...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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