Pros: Realistic and likeable story, great direction, and the best acting i've ever seen.
Cons: Without great direction and amazing acting, the story wouldn't have worked.
The Bottom Line: This is a wonderful movie - but the fact that _I_ think it's a wonderful movie might mean i'm turning into a movie geek. Or not. Read and decide.
The greatness of You Can Count on Me is intimately tied up with the most valid reason why you might hate it. It’s the direction (by Kenneth Lonergan), and the acting: never have I seen a movie, in scene after scene, convey so much with so little. It’s almost flamboyant, this minimalism, and I could understand being irritated. Why the self-handicap?, you might ask. Why leave everything as an actors’ version of Pictionary, making them communicate the plot and themes without being able to spell stuff out, making the audience piece everything together?
I have answers that satisfy me, anyway. The pressure, of the unfinished lines and the early cuts away from scenes, elicits the best acting performances I’ve ever seen: even from Laura Linney, who’s been reliably outstanding in Primal Fear, Tales from the City, the Mothman Prophecies, the Truman Show; even from Rory Culkin, who was 8 at the time. The need to pick up on implications made me much more focused and involved: Lonergan implicitly respects my (and your) intelligence, and that’s a good way to make that intelligence happen. It also made my second viewing even more rewarding than my first, seeing all the clues I’d glanced past the first time. But without any plot spoilers of note, what I’m going to do is walk you through some of the movie’s first half-hour, and let you get a feel for how (or if) the scenes work.
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The opening, for example: we see a middle-class, 40-ish couple in a car in the dark, listening absently to the radio as he drives. The woman breaks a silence to ask the man “Why is it that girls always get braces at the very age where they’re just becoming most self-conscious about their looks?” He looks thoughful: “I don’t know”, he answers, and is still thinking when a stopped car comes into their headlight’s view, alarmingly near. He reacts, jerks the wheel to the left; we see outside the car as a truck bears down from the opposite lane. We hear skidding in the blackness.
We are transported to a middle-class house’s front door: a teenage girl greets a police officer as “Darrell”, citizen to well-recognized citizen. He softly asks her to step outside; we see a blond girl and a curly-haired boy, preteens, playing inside, not seeing Darrell, and the boy accuses the teen (who seems to be a babysitter) of taking a smoke break. She goes out anyway, and Darrell looks intently at her, fighting back tears, mouth moving slowly and futilely.
We are transported to a church, where a Bach cello sonata plays so we don’t hear the speech of the firm-looking, bespectacled priestess. We again look at the girl and boy, stiff in the church’s front row, not quite praying. We get a few moments to memorize their faces. Then we see a blonde woman in her thirties, in the dayime, kneeling at a pair of gravestones: she looks like she could be the preteen, grown up, but the view is at a distance. _Then_ the real movie begins, with a woman named Sammy Prescott, now wearing glasses, driving her son Rudy in a sedan. If you didn’t know Linney (who plays Prescott) from other movies, you might not even be sure that she was the same woman you’d just seen at the gravestone. It will be spoken of later: once.
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We find out why Sammy was driving Rudy when she gets to her job at the bank, and finds the first of many post-it notes saying “Please See Me ASAP”. She knocks hesitantly at the door of her new boss “Mr. Everett”, who quickly corrects her: “Brian”. Brian is Matthew Broderick, who talks with the stiff prissiness he mastered in Election and the polite circumlocutions he tried to fend off Jim Carrey with in the Cable Guy; and Brian is a little concerned that she just takes off in the middle of the afternoon. We learn a lot in this short scene: that Scottsville, our setting, is a small town with small town casualness (“but I’d like to see us conduct ourselves as if we were the state’s largest branch”, Brian says, and somewhere in the back of his brain, his old guidance counselor applauds). That Sammy is socially isolated enough to see no options in terms of getting her son from school at the end of the day. That Sammy telegraphs discomfort with a broad, accomodating smile. That Sammy can communicate instant loathing without breaking that smile. That for the first and so far only time, a filmmaker is letting Laura Linney’s face and jaw show all the grooves and wrinkles that, at 36, she logically would be developing. (Yes, she’s still beautiful.)
How’s her love life? We learn in three minutes. We see her staring at earnestly handsome, nervous Bob over dinner, as he stares back even more intently. “What have you told {Rudy} about his father?”, he asks, and she fidgets as she temporizes: “Well, not that much… he knows that I don’t think all that highly of him, and he knows that I don’t want to see him again, and he knows that I don’t want to know anything about how he’s ended up. But I’ve tried to let him make up his own mind”. Bob laughs. “I’m surprised that you called me”, Bob says, and they take turns granting it’s been quite a few months, “but I’m really happy to see you again”, and he smiles, and she smiles back, and they share a moment. Then we see them under covers, side by side, looking reflective rather than thrilled, and Sammy puts on her smile, thanks him for the evening, and says it’s time to get back to Rudy.
The first scene with her brother, Terry Prescott, is even subtler. We know Sammy’s gotten a letter informing her of a visit. We saw Rudy lean out the passenger’s side of the car to pull the letter from the rural mailbox out at their street corner, and we’ve seen her smile broadly and talk Rudy into being excited (he hasn’t seen Terry in two years), and we’ve seen her file the letter in her correspondence drawer, where even the tops of Terry’s letters show that they’re colorful, in a childlike way, and that she’s stored a lot of them. We meet Terry with his girlfriend in her urban apartment: played by Mark Ruffalo, he’s still curly-haired and boyish, as well as scruffy and shoddily dressed. Violent Femmes fans may recognize the looks and grins and mannerisms of singer Gordon Gano: it’s doppelgangery, although the square-haired, firm-jawed picture of Ruffalo at the Internet Movie Database wouldn’t clue you into the resemblance.
Terry’s conversation with his girlfriend is so unspecific that I’m honestly not sure how I figured out, the first time, that they’re trying to raise money for her abortion. He explains to her that he needs to be gone for two nights (“I can’t just stay overnight, my sister’s not a bank”) – but when we see him greet Sammy at a café, where she waves madly to him through the window, he immediately apologizes for missing a bus and being a day late. Care to guess what that does to not treating Sammy like a bank?
He’ll stay around, though: it becomes less necessary to get back to Worchester right away when he’s on the phone that night, asking “Can I talk to Sheila?”, then going “She did WHAT!?!?”, then futilely trying to see if he can talk to her anyway.
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It’s also worth describing Terry’s loving rapport with Rudy. Like when he teaches Rudy the reason to hold a hammer from its base. Rudy resists with “But I hold it this way” (from right next to the hammering part); “Well, your way is wrong”, Terry says, amiably enough. “Why can’t I hold it _my_ way?”, Rudy whines; “You can”, Terry replies, and goes off to hammer his own nails. Rudy starts to resume via his own method, but is already shifting his hammer uncomfortably from hand to hand; he hears Terry hammering merrily away, and moves his own hand back. After a couple of swings, he starts to hold the base with both hands: he may not be grown-up strong, but he’s been set just free enough to believe their method.
You’ve already been warned, from his dingy appearance on, that Terry might not be a perfect role model for a kid – before he even sees Sammy, he greets aging cop Darrell with a huge hug and some friendly words, concluding “Carry on keeping the peace”, to which Darrell smiles “It’ll be a bit tougher now that you’re around, but I’ll manage”. But Terry is, for better or worse, happy to answer Rudy’s questions about why he didn’t like Rudy Sr., and happy to assure him that “you’ve gotta understand that your mother is, like, the most wonderful person in the world. So you’ve had some bad luck, and you’ve had some good luck”. It’s charming.
But then Terry asks Rudy if he likes Scottsville, and can’t help himself when Rudy says “Yes”. “WHY!?!?”, Terry yelps, and explains in detail why Rudy – an 8-year-old – is wrong.
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That’s plenty to go by. The other reason not to like this movie, in fact, is that there isn’t anything that would come out of left field after just these scenes. There’s no second car wreck, or even a car chase or a jewel heist; Terry isn’t going to meet a well-meaning young prostitute and introduce her to the dignified high life he couldn’t give Sheila. Darrell doesn’t get a young whippersnapper partner eager to turn Scottsville’s police department around, and if Bob is a double-agent hypnotically programmed to kill Darrell and disrupt his authority, no one remembers to say the “How about a nice game of solitaire?” trigger in his presence.
Sammy will have sex again, and she looks like she showers twice a day, but you won't get to watch. Given the frowning “No comment” with which she greets Terry’s “your Mom was even wilder than I was when we were kids”, you’d also be unwise to expect her mad descent into alcoholism, drug addiction, or white slavery. Nothing happens!, you might object, and you’d be wrong, but by Hollywood standards only barely.
We have a movie about whether Terry – a smart but undisciplined drifter whose smile vanishes into a fit of evasive looks and hunched shoulders whenever responsibilities are mentioned – can or will learn to settle down when his sister tries to give him a life in a boring small town he hates. We have a movie about whether that same drifter, and his temper problem, will be good for the nephew he’s so patient and loving with. We have a movie about how to deal with a politely unpleasant boss and a politely loving boyfriend and a very polite, very perceptive, unassuming priest (acted brilliantly by director Lonergan himself) whose advice just isn’t goddamn Catholic enough.
We have a movie where two of the most powerful, and unexpected, lines read: “No!”. Where another powerful line, the title, isn’t said at all, though we know where it fits. And where, if you already think you know what answers it will find to its questions, you’re probably wrong. At least, if you’re thinking in movie logic, you’re wrong. It’s so much better than that.
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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