Funny, Touching, Inspiring

Thoroughly modest in its means and ambition, You Can Count on Me is one of the best pictures I've seen all year. A big hit at Sundance last January, where it tied for first place with Girlfight and won the Waldo Salt screenwriting award, You Can Count on Me is precisely the kind of film that continues, however marginally, to justify the existence of that wintry fest in Utah. This rarest of treats, a brother-sister love story (with, hooray, no incest!), is short on special effects, explosions, and sentimentality, but long on the things that count, the things that money can't buy: character, situation, authentic location, and, in the person of relative unknowns Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo, superb acting. And in its welcome subtlety, it's also a film that respects rather than insults its audience's intelligence.

Linney plays Sammy, a small-town, upstate New York single mom who's raising Rudy (Rory Culkin -- yes, another Culkin boy), an eight-year-old who's rather sullen and naturally curious about his missing father. Sammy also has a boyfriend, Bob (Jon Tenney) she enjoys sleeping with, but whom she's not ready to commit to. Her hectic but well-ordered life is thrown into crisis mode when Brian (Matthew Broderick), the new, hardnosed manager of the bank where Sammy works as a loan officer, starts cracking the whip. (Things are not helped when she starts having a passionate, reckless affair with him, despite the presence on the scene of Brian's very pregnant wife.) Into this volatile mix comes Sammy's unstable but adored brother, Terry, who's looking for money to get out of the most recent jam he's gotten himself into. When Terry decides to stick around for a while, even though he despises the small-town claustrophobia he fled years earlier, he begins bonding with Rudy in ways that Sammy does not always like but that maybe Rudy needs. Rudy's encounter with his father, instigated by Terry, is a powerful one that seems positively Homeric in its mythic resonance.

Linney and Ruffalo are wonderfully matched. I don't even remember Linney as Jim Carrey's wife in The Truman Show, but her convincing performance here, along with her work in Terence Davies' forthcoming adaptation of The House of Mirth, is going to put her on the acting map. Ruffalo brings his experience as a stage actor to bear in his brilliant creation of the role of Terry, a role that should, in a just world, merit him an Oscar nomination. And the excellent script by first time director Kenneth Lonergan (a playwright who was also responsible for the deft screenplay of Analyze This), gives these professionals plenty of nuanced yet unfussy material to work with. Resolutely unsentimental (until, perhaps, the very final scene), the script rewards the audience by omitting as much as it puts in. (My favorite example is when Terry whispers to Sammy, "remember what we used to say as kids?," then neither says it.) Rory Culkin is also surprisingly good, with a resentful, anything-but-sweet edge to him that provides a welcome contrast to his brother Macaulay's arch cuteness. Broderick, who took on the role of the by-the-book bank manager as a favor to his old high school chum Lonergan, turns it into something deliciously complex. Lonergan himself appears in the film as a contemporary-minded clergyman who humorously refuses to supply Sammy the black-and-white moral dicta that she craves.

The film's funny, touching, even inspiring at times. It explores the tensions between urban and small-town visions in an insightful way that is fair to both. It intelligently explores the ups and downs, love/hate dynamics of sibling relationships, something that can be said of virtually no other film that has come out in years. You Can Count On Me doesn't break any new ground aesthetically and can hardly be regarded as cutting-edge, but viewers will recognize themselves and the world they know in it. It's the American independent film tradition at its most professionally solid and, if not at its absolute best, at a very high level indeed.