November 16–23, 2000

movie shorts

You Can Count on Me

by Sam Adams

Picture a room full of shouting people. An argument has reached fever pitch and everyone’s screaming at everyone else. The less people listen, the more people try to make themselves heard, each voice escalating in volume over the one before it until the very limits of lung capacity and loudness are stretched. Now picture one person, slightly shy, standing in the corner. Not willing to enter the fray, she simply starts speaking in a quiet, sure voice, walking slowly towards the center of the room, until every eye is on her. In the midst of all that shouting, the best way to command attention is to take a different route, and let those who will come along with you.

As we head into a holiday season that’s become one of the hottest battlegrounds for cash-hungry movie studios, it often seems like everyone’s shouting at once, begging you to see this blockbuster or that. And the movies shout too, with blistering sound effects and hyperactive visuals that scream Look How Much We Paid! How’s That For Value? After the summer’s lackluster box office and the bankruptcies of several theater chains, the din of advertising seems especially desperate this year: If The Grinch and Unbreakable don’t hit it big, there are going to be a lot of executives spending their holidays in the Hollywood equivalent of a cardboard box.

But if you care about movies, you have to look for the quiet movies, the ones that get lost in the din: the ones you have to listen for. And that’s what You Can Count on Me is. Though it split the grand prize at Sundance (and picked up screenwriting honors as well), it hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention (or marketing dollars) as its co-honoree Girlfight, a decent but far inferior film. Why? Because though You Can Count on Me has good-looking young stars (Laura Linney, Mark Ruffalo) and drama to burn, it’s not pre-digested and it doesn’t come at the audience in familiar ways that all but beg to be commodified. It’s not the kind of movie you can watch while juggling popcorn and Diet Coke and letting the people next to you in and out four times and listening to the asshole behind you talk on his cell phone and still understand. In other words, it’s a movie you have to pay attention to, a skill it often seems most audiences (or at least someone in most every audience) have lost. You Can Count On Me isn’t plot-driven, it doesn’t have a simple message, and though the soundtrack has plenty of pop currency (Steve Earle, Marah, even a little Loretta Lynn), the music’s used almost subliminally, not larded over scenes to cover a lack of editing skill. (Further dimming the pop quotient, the country songs share equal time with Bach cello solos.)

Kenneth Lonergan, who makes his screen directing debut with You Can Count On Me, has an undistinguished (Analyze This, The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle) career as a Hollywood screenwriter, and a far more distinguished one as an off-Broadway playwright (This is Our Youth, The Waverly Gallery). Perhaps the best way to explain the film’s striking maturity is as a mixture of those two careers. He certainly has a playwright’s flair for dialogue, but there’s none of the stagy ponderousness that usually infects the transition from theater to film. And Lonergan’s decade-long Hollywood career (most spent working uncredited or on unproduced scripts) has clearly left him with an airtight knowledge of screenplay construction, and just as importantly a healthy distaste for the clichés of Hollywood shorthand.

You Can Count On Me’s story couldn’t be simpler. (Well, it could, but then it would star Arnold Schwarzenegger.) Sammy (Laura Linney) is a single mother holding it together in a small town in upstate New York. Her parents were killed in a car crash when she was a child, and everything about her, from her prim outfits to her job in a bank, tells you this is someone whose life is built on calculated risk: Control the odds, and you won’t get hurt (again). Into this walks Terry (Mark Ruffalo), her wayward younger brother, a sad-eyed perpetual fuckup who’s been out of touch with his sister for the better part of a year, and only comes home because he needs a place to stay, and money to help get his teenage girlfriend (Gaby Hoffmann) out of trouble. (We presume she needs an abortion, though it’s never spelled out.) The cliché would be to have Terry win and then abuse his sister’s trust, or to have him learn a valuable lesson about the meaning of family. But that last lesson’s already been learned; despite their differences, the brother and sister’s love for each other is never in doubt. The problem is, as so often happens in life and so rarely in movies, that that’s not enough.

Stripped down to its essence, You Can Count On Me’s plot is about Terry trying to straighten up, and mostly failing, and Sammy trying to loosen up, and mostly failing. Sammy also feuds with her even-more-uptight boss (Matthew Broderick) and an inconstant suitor (Jon Tenney) and juggles caring for her child-like younger brother and her young son (Rory Culkin), just to keep things interesting. But what Lonergan excels at is catching the moments between actions, the minute gestures that go beyond words. While a handful of scenes (some of which were developed as one-act plays) run nearly ten minutes, others run only several seconds, but we still feel their weight. When Sammy’s proposed to, we don’t get the proposal, only her reaction: partly because Lonergan trusts the audience to catch up, and partly (perhaps) because he couldn’t stomach the cliché of writing one more "Make me the happiest guy in the world" scene.

Edited gently but with remarkable sophistication, You Can Count On Me breaks its story into shards, but with such a light touch you don’t notice how quickly it shifts. It’s like glimpsing a story through the windows of a moving car — as opposed to, say, being pummeled with an onslaught of discombobulated images.

Ruffalo and Linney bring the story to life, with the familiarity of siblings who know each other almost better than they’d like to. Linney gives her character a kind of desperate purity, as if by acting logically she can force life to do the same. And Ruffalo, in his first major screen role, has an astonishing openness to the camera, a childlike vulnerability occasionally laced with simmering anger. They’re such a pleasure to watch it hardly matters when the plot advances, or when it doesn’t.

What’s most interesting about You Can Count On Me is the way it makes us reconsider how we deal with grief. Sammy seems to have all the answers: an ordered life, a steady job, a good relationship with her local priest (incarnated with molasses wit by the director). But perhaps in his wanderings, Terry is really the more honest of the two, the one who admits how they’ve both been stripped of their roots. You Can Count On Me is far too smart to do anything more than suggest the beginnings of answers to the questions it poses. But perhaps it’s only fraudulent for a two-hour movie to pretend to more. You certainly don’t feel cheated. You feel inspired, to find your own answers, or ask different questions, or simply to see it again.

(Bryn Mawr)