The first fifteen minutes of Ken Lonergan's You Can Count On Me, although thematically important to the film, seem significantly out of place in the film. This has to due with the fact that the scenes have little visual urgency and seem inappropriately out of tune with the rest of film's quieter tone. Sammy and her younger brother Terry quietly watch television as their parents are run over by a truck. After a cursory moment that shows the young Sammy and Terry grieving at a funeral, Lonergan's film delves into a wonderfully observed tale of how the deadly accident retarded the lives of the older Sammy (Laura Linney) and Terry (Mark Ruffalo).
Terry, down on his luck and living with a loser girlfriend, sweeps into town and starts living with Sammy. Instantly, the brother and sister are forced to deal with their relationship in a new light. The greatest praise I can give Lonergan is that he exercises a lot of control in never mentioning the death of Sammy and Terry's parents. Everything that the two characters strive for in this film is a direct result of the pain and lost that greeted them upon their parents' death but nary a comment is made about the incident.
Sammy lives alone with her son Rudy (Rory Culkin), sheltering him from the reality of how much of a loser his real father is. Terry becomes very close to his nephew and assumes the role of surrogate father. He takes this instinctual need to be a role model to Rudy a little to far by introducing Rudy to his deadbeat father (Josh Lucas). It's a noble deed that is painfully and quietly rooted in the fact that Terry had his own relationship with his father truncated the day that he died in the car accident.
It's funny to see how much Terry thinks he knows about the world, ridiculing the small-time life that Sammy has decided to live. Although her life is obviously boring, his drifter mentality is about as scatterbrained as his sister's quiet existence, whose emotions are always threatening to boil over.
Sammy lives a painfully drab life that consists of nothing more than driving her son to school and going to work at a small bank. Such a peaceful existence is off-putting to the big-city man that Terry fancies himself to be and the problem isn't necessarily that Sammy is living small but that she isn't living at all. She is dating a man that she doesn't love, nor wants to marry, and soon gets sexually involved with her new boss Brian (Matthew Broderick).
There isn't a particularly strong aesthetic sensibility running throughout You Can Count on Me but the strength of the movie is the way that Lonergan's dialogue is so painfully familiar. Lonergan explores such simple truths that one can't help but relate to the lives of his characters. One great scene toward the end of the film finds Terry being forced to embrace religion by his sister. Here is a woman who is having an affair with a married man, forcing God onto a man who is far from perfect but a man who, nonetheless, has shown a more receptive need to get out and change his life and the life of the people around him. She is not being malicious, but merely continuing to play the role of mother figure to her brother; a role she learned to play with little training.
Linney, in an impressively nuanced performance, plays Sammy as an emotionally insecure woman who makes many a wrong decision. A woman that would otherwise shun adultery chooses comfort in the arms of a married man whenever she feels she is being pressured into marriage by a boyfriend she doesn't know if she wants to marry. The film ends with the two siblings fighting but ultimately coming to terms with the fact that even though they can no longer live together, the familiarity of their emotionally stilted lives will always keep them at arms link. No one speaks the titular platitude in the film aloud but the viewer is always aware of how the two characters' lives are emotionally and inextricably bound.
Terry, down on his luck and living with a loser girlfriend, sweeps into town and starts living with Sammy. Instantly, the brother and sister are forced to deal with their relationship in a new light. The greatest praise I can give Lonergan is that he exercises a lot of control in never mentioning the death of Sammy and Terry's parents. Everything that the two characters strive for in this film is a direct result of the pain and lost that greeted them upon their parents' death but nary a comment is made about the incident.
Sammy lives alone with her son Rudy (Rory Culkin), sheltering him from the reality of how much of a loser his real father is. Terry becomes very close to his nephew and assumes the role of surrogate father. He takes this instinctual need to be a role model to Rudy a little to far by introducing Rudy to his deadbeat father (Josh Lucas). It's a noble deed that is painfully and quietly rooted in the fact that Terry had his own relationship with his father truncated the day that he died in the car accident.
It's funny to see how much Terry thinks he knows about the world, ridiculing the small-time life that Sammy has decided to live. Although her life is obviously boring, his drifter mentality is about as scatterbrained as his sister's quiet existence, whose emotions are always threatening to boil over.
Sammy lives a painfully drab life that consists of nothing more than driving her son to school and going to work at a small bank. Such a peaceful existence is off-putting to the big-city man that Terry fancies himself to be and the problem isn't necessarily that Sammy is living small but that she isn't living at all. She is dating a man that she doesn't love, nor wants to marry, and soon gets sexually involved with her new boss Brian (Matthew Broderick).
There isn't a particularly strong aesthetic sensibility running throughout You Can Count on Me but the strength of the movie is the way that Lonergan's dialogue is so painfully familiar. Lonergan explores such simple truths that one can't help but relate to the lives of his characters. One great scene toward the end of the film finds Terry being forced to embrace religion by his sister. Here is a woman who is having an affair with a married man, forcing God onto a man who is far from perfect but a man who, nonetheless, has shown a more receptive need to get out and change his life and the life of the people around him. She is not being malicious, but merely continuing to play the role of mother figure to her brother; a role she learned to play with little training.
Linney, in an impressively nuanced performance, plays Sammy as an emotionally insecure woman who makes many a wrong decision. A woman that would otherwise shun adultery chooses comfort in the arms of a married man whenever she feels she is being pressured into marriage by a boyfriend she doesn't know if she wants to marry. The film ends with the two siblings fighting but ultimately coming to terms with the fact that even though they can no longer live together, the familiarity of their emotionally stilted lives will always keep them at arms link. No one speaks the titular platitude in the film aloud but the viewer is always aware of how the two characters' lives are emotionally and inextricably bound.