You Can Count On Me

"You Can Count on Me" is about how we try to do the right thing in life, and although we don't always succeed, the important thing is that we try. The film is quietly amazing, depending, as so few movies do these days, on characters who act like people and not plot devices. \nSammy (Laura Linney) and Terry (Mark Ruffalo) are sister and brother. Their parents died in a car crash when they were young, and they brought each other up in their small hometown of Scottsville, N.Y. At the beginning of the movie, Sammy seems to be turning her life around after a run of bad luck. She's raising a son by herself and has a good job at the bank, but she's having problems with her new boss (Matthew Broderick).\nMeanwhile, Terry comes back to Scottsville to visit his sister after an unexplained absence, in which we learn he's been everywhere from Alaska to Florida. Terry has a train wreck look about him, as if the world seems to be offering just a little too much for him to process all at once. He finds the perfect companion in Sammy's son, Rudy (Rory Culkin, looking unmistakably like an 8-year-old Macaulay), with whom he shares a childlike directness and honesty. \nKenneth Lonergan is a playwright and novelist with a few previous screenwriting credits (including "Analyze This" and Martin Scorsese's forthcoming "Gangs of New York"), and this is his directorial debut. Visually the movie is low key, and the writing is excellent but restrained. This isn't a show-offy screenwriter's movie.\nThe movie eschews cheap melodrama for real human drama, establishing complex relationships between characters we come to genuinely care about. When Terry gets into town and Sammy meets him for lunch, we sense these two people have a lifetime of shared experiences. \nLinney and Ruffalo have a believable rapport that swings from adoration to frustration without seeming forced. They existed before the movie starts and will continue to exist after it's over. In a year of gladiators and cannibals, that's really something.