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You Can Count On Me
****
Cinema Releases - March 23, 2001
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. 109
minutes. Written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan. Starring Laura Linney,
Mark Ruffalo, Rory Culkin, Matthew Broderick, Jon
Tenney.
There is a captivating rapport between people who
have been close to each other for years -- a palpable sense of history,
familiarity and love. That's one of the things captured best in "You
Can Count On Me", which is one of the year's best films. It takes
place in a small New York town, where Sammy (Laura Linney) is raising her
8-year old son Rudy (Rory Culkin) in the family home. Back to town arrives
her aimless brother Terry (Mark Ruffalo); he's come with the intention of
borrowing money, but ends up sticking around for a while.
As kids, Sammy and Terry raised each other, after
their parents were killed in a car crash. Now Sammy works in the local bank
and is a good single mom, while Terry lives in the city and drifts from job
to job and girl to girl. The movie sees them thrown back together, and it's
fascinating to watch the interaction -- the intimacy that is still there,
the further intimacy that finds its way back, and the way things develop
over the weeks of Terry's stay.
The writer and director, Kenneth Lonergan, makes
it feel like a lot is happening. Sammy has an affair with the new bank manager
(Matthew Broderick), an alternately cute and insufferable guy who confuses
officiousness and jargon with professionalism and efficiency. She gets a
marriage proposal from some guy she calls up once in a while for sex and
advice (Jon Tenney). She gets her parish priest (Lonergan) to give Terry
advice on finding direction. And Terry and Rudy form a wonderful bond; the
uncle has the intelligence of a man but the spirit and manner of a kid, and
enjoys hanging with his nephew and talking to him straight. An intelligent
father-son dynamic materialises, and the two go on wonderful little adventures
like a fishing trip and a secret nighttime excursion to the local
saloon.
Even with all of this, "You Can Count On Me" is
a lot less densely plotted than, say, a soap opera, or a conventional Hollywood
picture. 'Alamaier', a user of the Internet Movie Database comments board,
points out correctly that in most dramas we'd expect manufactured crises
like someone going missing or getting cancer, and it's refreshing for all
that to be absent for once -- we've seen it too many times before. This is
a witty, lively film that flows with ease -- a description of the plot may
make it sound like one of those TV movies that use the problems people face
as vehicles for soppy social or moral commentary, but it's a whole lot of
fun. We learn at one point that Sammy and Terry were pretty wild in their
teenage years, and that kinda explains why they've still got such spunk about
them now.
What's special about "You Can Count on Me" is
the way we get so involved we grow to know and love those onscreen. Although
completely different in look and feel, it's similar to "Terms of Endearment"
in that we settle into the rhythms of these people's lives. In the final
scene, when Terry is about to head back to the city, and asks Sammy "Remember
what we used to say to each other when we were kids?", we don't need another
line explaining -- we know what he's talking about, we know what he
means.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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