You Can Count on Me Review
by "Harvey S. Karten" (film_critic AT compuserve DOT com)October 20th, 2000
YOU CAN COUNT ON ME
Reviewed by Harvey Karten
Paramount Classics/Shooting Gallery Series
Director: Ken Lonergan
Writer: Ken Lonergan
Cast: Laura Linney, Mark Ruffalo, Rory Culkin, Matthew Broderick, Jon Tenney, J. Smith-Cameron, Ken Lonergan
"You Can Count on Me" will never get an Oscar for its title (if such an award existed), but oh, what a gem of a movie. Not long into the story, we don't wonder that this Shooting Gallery Release under the Paramount Classics label won the Grand Jury Award at last January's Sundance Festival and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting prize to boot. Beautifully photographed in New York's Catskill Mountains--in a town that looks as though it came out of the pages of the old Saturday Evening Post's Norman Rockwell sketches--"You Can Count on Me" focuses sensitively on two characters from the same family whose lives took diametrically opposing turns after a terrible accident took the lives of their parents. Kenneth Lonergan--who wrote and directed this treasure--and even does some shtick as a Catholic priest whose features and gestures could remind you of Albert Brooks--does a remarkable job of carefully showing the impact that an itinerant, troubled young man has on her more stable, but deep-down messed up, sister. After watching the movie-- transfixed on the authenticity of its people--you wouldn't guess that the story came from the pen of the guy who wrote the Mafia comedy "Analyze This," as Lonergan abandons the flat-out blatant howls of the Mafia comedy in favor of a sweet but never overly sentimental drama infused with quiet humor.
Lonergan opens on a horrendous mishap, the collision of a train with a car holding the parents of Sammy Prescott (Laura Linney) and her brother Terry (Mark Ruffalo), which orphaned the children when Terry was eight years old. When Sammy, who longs for stability and security after this mishap, chooses to remain in the safe but unexciting town of Scottsville, New York, securing a divorce after giving birth to a gifted young man named Rudy (Rory Culkin), her more impulsive brother takes to the road, rarely writing of his misadventures and his life in far-flung states like Alaska and Florida. In need of money, Terry leaves his girl friend ostensibly for a short time to borrow funds from his sister--who works as a loan officer under the supervision an uptight bank manager, Brian (Matthew Broderick).
As lenser Stephen Kazmierski incisively points his camera to a small circle of characters who are sometimes seen against the breathtaking panorama of the Catskills, Lonergan- -exploiting the crisp editing style of Anne McCabe and a fitting score of Lesley Barber's cello music--details the ways that Sammy and Terry are changed by the experience. We would expect Sammy to question her small-town ways, which are challenged by her more worldly but all-too-wild sib, but most appealing is the way that Terry for the first time learns to care for someone other than himself through his relationship with his eight-year-old nephew Rudy (Rory Culkin in his first starring movie role), whom he takes fishing and even sneaks out of the house one night to shoot some pool in the loud, local bar.
The ways that Sammy's inhibitions are challenged are expressed in even more subtle ways, as she becomes surprisingly involved with her anal-retentive boss, Brian (played by Matthew Broderick with that actor's usual whimsy) and questions her off-again, on-again relationship with the handsome but indecisive neighbor, Bob (Jon Tenney). One scene which stands out as an understated marvel is the conversation between Sammy and her Catholic priest (Kenneth Lonergan), who with his contemporary bent acts more as a psychologist than an upholder of strict religious rules. When Sammy asks the cleric whether fornication and adultery are still officially classified by the Church as hell- roasting sinful, the preacher's reply is a model of waggery.
Where has Laura Linney been? I saw her on the stage of New York's Manhattan Theatre Club eons ago in a far more serious work, "Sight Unseen," and now, having aged not at all, she comes across as the perfect girl-next-door--a Renee Zellweger type except that Ms. Linney is the superior performer. If you have any feeling at all, she can melt your heart, make you root for her despite her occasional moral failing, and cheer her on as she gets the goods on her boss and tells him off in yet another of the movie's comical scenes. "You Can Count on Me" looks at first like a film that you might find on eight o'clock TV, but as you get involved deeply in the story, you sense that Lonergan treats his characters with far more sincerity and a whole lot of technique. This is a movie to cherish.
Rated R. Running time: 109 minutes. (C) 2000 by Harvey Karten, [email protected]
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