It's nearly impossible to pinpoint what makes fiction seem "real," but we know it when we see it. Kenneth Lonergan's film follows a few weeks in the lives of estranged siblings played with grace and humor by Mark Ruffalo and Laura Linney. Lonergan allows his characters to make mistakes – big ones – without writing them off as endearing or even forgivable. At one point Terry, Ruffalo's drifter character, wanders into his childhood bedroom, now occupied by his young nephew. He lights a cigarette and waxes poetic about the limitations of their upstate New York town before the boy interrupts: "What are you talking about?" Terry exhales: "I have no idea." Lonergan's film gently wonders whether any of us do. – Catherine Epstein

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14351 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-06-26
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 110 minutes

Amazon.com
You Can Count On Me starts 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 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 energized 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 8-year-old (Rory Culkin), sneaking him out to play empowering bar pool, later introducing him to the weaselly dad he's fantasized 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 humor 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

From The New Yorker
The first-rate actress Laura Linney-bland on the surface but with angry impulses churning underneath-gives a detailed and involving performance as a single working mother in a small and somewhat boring upstate New York town. When her screwup of a kid brother (Mark Ruffalo) returns from Alaska, she's torn between tossing him out and letting him stay on and become a companion to her fatherless son (Rory Culkin). The movie was written and directed by the playwright and screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan, who pays close attention to the way so many of us are divided between good and bad impulses-including bad impulses we desperately need to act on if we're not going to feel half-dead. Lonergan's work is quiet but intense, and Ruffalo-dark and sensual and agonizingly confused-gives a heartbreaking performance. With Matthew Broderick and Jon Tenney as Linney's suitors. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker