Old Yorker

Kenneth Lonergan (2000)

This drama about a single mother and the various men in her life is likeable and sometimes perceptive but it’s also indecisive and finally unsatisfying.  Sammy (Samantha) works in a bank in her home town of Scottsville, New York.  She lives with her eight-year-old son Rudi, named for the biological father he’s never met.   She’s been in and out of a tentative relationship with a local man called Bob.  (Is there an implication that thirty-something Bob is still a mother’s boy?  If so, it’s a very slight implication.)  Sammy is having to cope with a new manager at the bank – a control freak called Brian, who objects to her working flexibly to collect Rudi from school, tapes messages to her office to ‘Please see me ASAP’ and gets exercised about the brightly-coloured background on some of the other staff’s computer screens.   Then Terry, Sammy’s drifter younger brother, comes to stay.

You Can Count on Me veers uncertainly between focusing on a single individual and trying to create multiple centres of attention.  Sammy comes across as the main character but how much this is intentional and how much the result of the force of Laura Linney’s acting is less clear.  Linney is required to go through too many outbursts of angry exasperation – and doesn’t have much scope for varying them – but she has such strong audience rapport that it’s easy to keep rooting for her.  Sammy and Terry aren’t physically similar and – except for a scene in which they stand side by side looking at the night sky (he smoking pot, she telling him she’s just had sex with her new boss) –they don’t much feel like sister and brother either.   (They do in this exchange, which delivers a very recognisable sense of the persistent strength of underlying sibling intimacy, of how the fact that you shared fundamental things years ago can allow you to share secrets years and distances later.)   A bigger problem is that, whereas Laura Linney is convincing as a small-town girl, Mark Ruffalo doesn’t give the same impression – or seem like a product of Scottsville, whose ‘dull, narrow people’ Terry deplores.  (You don’t really believe it when Terry first comes back and is greeted like a long lost son by the neighbourhood policeman and a local shopkeeper.)   And although Ruffalo gives a sympathetic, intelligent performance, Terry remains strangely opaque.

There are some very well-written scenes in You Can Count on Me – especially a late-night conversation between Rudi and Terry in the boy’s bedroom.  It’s one of the few times that Terry seems to be talking candidly but with a relaxed, pacific resignation.    Even as he grows to love Terry as a father figure, Rudi always seems more psychically mature than his uncle – a precocious weltschmerz hangs about him.  Rory Culkin has the expert comic timing you might expect of Macaulay’s kid brother but he’s emotionally expressive too – both raw and guarded.  The writer-director Kenneth Lonergan appears as the priest of the local church where Sammy still worships (and Terry emphatically doesn’t) and reads the lines as intelligently as he’s written them.  The film is appealing too in depicting people who are fallible but likeable, and anything but black or white.  I liked the way in which aggression seemed always close to the surface for Sammy and Terry and Brian – and Sammy’s being infuriated by the implacable acquiescence of the genial, handsome Bob (well played by Jon Tenney) is very convincing.  Yet there are pivotal aspects of the story that aren’t credible:  given that Terry is notoriously unreliable, it seems improbable that Sammy, even though she needs help with child care because of Brian’s lack of sympathy for her situation, would entrust Rudi to her brother’s care so soon and so easily.

Lonergan can certainly write incisive, believable dialogue – and direct the actors to make the most of it.  He’s less good at following through.   For example, there’s a real weight to the scene in which Terry tells his girlfriend Sheila (Gaby Hoffmann) in Massachusetts that he’s off to see his sister but will be back that night.  Shortly after arriving at Sammy’s, Terry learns in a phone call home that Sheila has tried (and failed) to commit suicide.  After his initial reaction to this has been shown, Terry’s feelings about his girlfriend are completely forgotten – the initial scene with her comes to seem like something you remember from another film.   Matthew Broderick brilliantly develops the bank manager Brian from a humourlessly affable tyrant into an unhappy husband but, once Sammy’s fling with him has run its course, the character is virtually disposed of – Lonergan doesn’t seem to know what to do with Brian.  Worse is the script’s seeming reliance on the death of Sammy’s and Terry’s parents in a car crash (which we see in a prologue to the main story), when the children were very young, as an implied ‘explanation’ for how their lives have turned out (particularly Terry’s).  The climax to You Can Count on Me is designed to suggest it’s all been about an orphaned brother and sister.  Oddly enough, it’s the interactions of both Sammy and Terry with the other characters that make the film as interesting to watch as it is.

3 May 2010