From moment to moment life remains pretty much the same, struggle as one might to grasp those individual moments, to turn them into turning-points.
It is on these turning points that all art dwells. The rarest art recognizes the rarity of these turning points, and how mostly they're small and quiet moments.
Hollywood engages the big moments: death, explosions, divorce, sparks of genius. A subtle medium has the nuance to engage the minor moments, the ones out of which most of life is made.
"You Can Count on Me" captures the hidden ritual of day-to-day life, and how an affront on that ritual is as frustrating as an affront on life. These moments, which flow into the vapidity of life, spike only those for whom they are sacred.
Laura Linney (Sammy) plays a single mother with a job at a bank living in blue-collar upstate New York with her fairly normal eight-year old son Rory Culkin.
She leaves work every mid-afternoon for 15 minutes to pick her son up from the bus-stop and drop him off at a daycare.
She lunches regularly at a local restaurant.
She meets periodically with Jon Tenney (Bob) to have sex.
She awaits letters from her brother.
It is this constancy, this consistency that allows her to survive in a mundane town -- the right amount of time with her child, the right amount of contact with people and the right connection with her family.
She gets a new boss at the bank -- Matthew Broderick -- who while not as bad as a Dilbert cartoon or a police chief on a TV movie has painfully (though not comically) little understanding of human relations and much less management.
A dud from the start, he makes Linney the object of his attention: first as a scapegoat for the provinciality of the bank, and second of his libido (his pregnant wife does not appear to enjoy living in Scottsville, with or without her upwardly-mobile husband).
Linney reacts to the scapegoatism appropriately; she reacts a little more sympathetically to the libido part. She has a short fling with him because, we surmise, and take the hint, she was less than boring as a child, and only calmed down to raise her son.
And so it is that her ordinary rituals in an apparently ordinary life do not throw a rug over a second life but tack down a wall-to-wall carpet to give unity to her room of life.
Mark Ruffalo (Terry), who plays Linney's brother, is a suave, unfortunate, prone to temper drifter.
His psychical closeness to his sister is at times eclipsed by thousands of miles, months in jail and impossibly immature and vindictive outlashes. He'd be a loser were it not for his periods of childlike tenderness and masculine appeal, coupled with caring.
The important people in our lives are those who, as the title goes, can count on us. For this "counting on" is reflexive: it is not reliance, where the one drags down the other, but instead an offer from one engaged by the other.
Both she and her brother counted on each other throughout their childhood (their parents, as we see in the excellent first few minutes of the film, died in a most routine car accident when she and her brother were elementary-school age). When her routine breaks, she must count on him, regardless of the questionable strength of his shoulder to lean on.
Kenneth Lonergan, who wrote and directed the film, created in "You Can Count On Me" a drama with tremendous quality and realism.
Its characters for the most part do not act as stereotypes or "odd ducks" or give minutes of "knowing looks." Ruffalo becomes too philosophically self-assured, in the dharma bum sort of way near the end. Broderick's obfuscation of the position of power yields to incredulity at points.
But on the whole, each character pulses with that forceful longing to be a part of something when they know they cannot be.
To run in parallel with others -- free from yet relevant to others -- maybe that's the point of life. Or at least of ritual: the ephemerality of the simple moment that relates to the complexity of decades.
