Delayed Reaction: You Can Count on Me

Premise: An irresponsible brother comes to visit his sister in the town they grew up in.

 

Kenneth Lonnergan hasn't made many films but there's already a pretty clear formula to them: Start with a tragedy then follow characters as they try to live normal lives. In Margaret it's the stranger dying in the car accident. In Manchester By the Sea, it's Casey Affleck's children dying in a fire. In You Can Count on Me, it's Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo's parents dying in a car accident when they were kids. As the film with the most distant tragedy, You Can Count on Me is also the most mundane of his movies on the surface. There isn't a ton of plot to the movie. Frankly, Linney's affair with her boss feels included only to have something eventful happen.

 

This movie veers dangerously close to being a "You can't go home movie". That's a movie where a worldly city character goes back to the small town they grew up in so they can realize either that they've outgrown that world or that there's a charm to the slow-paced life of these simple folks. It's very easy to be patronizing with that kind of movie. It makes sense. If screenwriters really believed small town life was superior, then they wouldn't be trying to make it in Hollywood. You Can Count on Me stops short of this though. It's as much Linney's movie as Ruffalo's, so we see both sides of it. Linney seems to like he small town life, but not in a beat-down, all hope has been crushed out of her kind of way. Ruffalo is more worldly, but he has nothing to show for it. The greatest interest in the movie is the conversations the siblings aren't having. Lonnergan's movies are excellent are portraying characters without answers yet they are also not driven by getting those answers.

 

The key to this movie is that Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo are really good in it. Linney rightly got an Oscar nomination for the role and Ruffalo's lack of a nomination remains one of the biggest mysteries of his career. They are such interesting performers that I didn't really mind how often nothing was happening in the movie.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend