Stars: Amy Ryan, Laura Linney, Rory Culkin, Matthew Broderick, Jon Tenney

Director: Kenneth Lonergan

Summary: Sammy, a single mother of eight year old Rudy finds her life thrown upside down when her brother returns to town after a long absence...

Set in a small town in upstate New York, YOU CAN COUNT ON ME looks at a brother and sister who grew up together as orphans but now face life with very different perspectives. Sammy (Laura Linney) works at the local bank. Most of her attention goes into raising her 8-year-old son, Rudy (Rory Culkin), and drifting in a tepid romance with Bob (Jon Tenney). The first disruption to her dutiful routine arrives in the form of new bank manager Brian (Matthew Broderick), intent on whipping his employees into shape. Then Sammy's wayward brother, Terry (Mark Ruffalo) shows up after a long absence, and her happiness quickly turns sour when she realizes he has only come to ask for money--again. But with all the elements for a backwater soap opera in place, the story instead becomes a subtle portrait of good intentions and fractured relationships.
First-time director Ken Lonergan was already a noted Hollywood screenwriter (ANALYZE THIS), but he saved his screenplay for himself. Avoiding both big-budget maudlin and low-budget posturing, he steers COUNT ON ME straight to the gut with an artful balance of pain and comedy. A good number of excellent performances, especially by Ruffalo as the screw-up Terry, turn the film into a remarkably honest and moving experience.

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You Can Count on Mestarts with a terrible car crash that instantly orphans a little boy and his older sister. At film's end, that boy, now a grown-up nomad and ne'er-do-well, takes off by Greyhound bus after a brief reunion with his sister, who lives at permanent anchor in their unspoiled hometown. The sibling saga that unreels between wrenching collision and bittersweet separation celebrates the idiosyncratic ways wounded folk like Terry (Mark Ruffalo) and Sammy (Laura Linney) put one foot in front of the other, both energised and hamstrung by the knowledge that nothing is ever certain in the road-movie of life. During his visit, Terry roils Sammy's becalmed existence, mostly by "fathering"--for good and ill--her overprotected eight-year-old (Rory Culkin), sneaking him out to play empowering bar pool, later introducing him to the weaselly dad he's fantasised into a superhero. Sammy starts a torrid affair with her married boss at the bank (Matthew Broderick gives delicious bureaucratic smarm) and considers marrying her sometime suitor (Jon Tenney), sweetly dull yet dependable.

The narrative peaks here are human-sized, elevated by gentle humour and clear-eyed faith in the existential importance of these intersecting small-town lives. Linney is simply superb as Sammy, wild girl gone good, involuntarily "mothering" every man in her life. An authentic original, newcomer Ruffalo gives his modern-day Huck Finn a drawling, James Dean delivery tuned somewhere between a screwup's whine and the twang of pothead wisdom. (Hard to think of another recent film that so deftly nails down the rich dynamics of everyday conversation--the starts and stops, circumlocutions, clichés, sudden veers into revelation and eloquence.) This is that rarity, an action movie of the heart: no explosions or epiphanies, yet everything evolves through the catalysts of character and experience. --Kathleen Murphy, Amazon.com

Aspect Ratio:	2.35 Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Subtitles:	English
Year:	2000
Release Date:	April 2, 2002
Runtime:	106 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	M P 111 D
Keywords:	You, Can, Comedy, Count, General, Wide, Screen, Me, Drama
Genre:	Drama