Why are you smoking?
Um, because it’s bad. Don’t ever do it.

I have a particular fondness for small movies that appear to be saying little, if anything, and yet months and years later keep drawing you back to them, revealing more and more truth with each viewing. (Or, as the case may be, each listening; as I spend my hours working, I play movies, and sometimes you collect more from the sounds of a movie than the sights of it.)

One of my favorite small movies of the last few years is writer/director Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count On Me. You might have missed its two Academy Award nominations in 2001 — Laura Linney for Best Actress, Lonergan for Best Original Screenplay — since that was a Big Movie year; this and other small movies were heavily overshadowed by movies like Erin Brockovich, Traffic and Gladiator.

A few weeks ago Susan and I were uninspired by the crop at the box office, so we poked around Borders for something to take back to her place and watch. We were in the middle of packing up her apartment, and desperately needed a break. We ended up watching the old Cary Grant classic Arsenic and Old Lace, though we bought several movies that night. When I saw You Can Count On Me, I couldn’t resist. I’d seen it three or four times, and usually that’s enough to convince me to own it. If a movie’s got three or four happy viewings in it, it’s got three or four more at least.

I love this movie. I love the no-nonsense approach that Sammy (Linney) takes to her life, and the way the movie quickly unravels her, and then begins the process of sewing her back together. I love the way Terry (Mark Ruffalo), her irresponsible scalawag of a brother, dispenses his own streetwise wisdom that, if you blink, you lose in his sometimes angry, always rambling speeches. But mostly I love the differences in the way each of them interact with Sammy’s son, Rudy (Rory Culkin).

Sammy is a single mother; Terry is the out-of-nowhere uncle/stranger. Sammy wants to shape her son into a man she can be proud of; Terry simply wants to know him. Sammy is amused by the sometimes grown-up way her son speaks; Terry either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care that Rudy is a child, and talks to him, most of the time, as if he were simply a smaller adult. For example:

Sammy: How was school?
Rudy: Stupid.
S.: Why do you say that?
R.: We’re supposed to write a story for English homework. But they didn’t tell us what it’s supposed to be about.
S.: Well, what do you mean?
R.: I mean, they didn’t tell us what it’s supposed to be about. They said do whatever you want.
S.: Well, what’s wrong with that?
R.: I don’t know. I just think it’s … unstructured.
S.: (hiding a smile) Well, I’m sure you’ll think of something. And if you can’t, I’ll help you.

Terry, on the other hand, is as much of a child (or as much of an adult) as Rudy is:

Terry: You mind if I ask you a personal question?
Rudy: I don’t know.
T.: Do you like it here? I mean, in Scottsville?
R.: Yeah.
T.: Why?
R.: I don’t know. My friends are here, I like the scenery… I don’t know.
T.: I know, I know. It’s just so… there’s nothing to do here.
R.: Yes there is.
T.: No, there isn’t, man. It’s narrow. It’s dull. It’s a dull, narrow town full of dull, narrow people who don’t know anything except what things are like right around here. They have no perspective whatsoever, no scope. They might as well be living in the nineteenth century cause they have no idea what’s going on, and if you try and tell em that, they want to fucking kill you.
R.: What are you talking about?
T.: I have no idea.

When I was Rudy’s age, nobody ever talked to me like this. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know that I wanted them to, or that they didn’t know it either. The movie is about a hundred different things — the choices that a single mother makes, the repercussions of severe loss at an early age, the various ways that people go astray and wander back on course — but for me it’s mostly about a boy who is somehow wiser than the two most important figures in his life, both of whom are reduced at times to little more than children themselves.

Sammy: I want you to leave.
Terry: What do you mean?
S.: I mean I don’t think you should live here. I don’t think you know how to behave around an eight-year-old. And I don’t know how to make you stop, so… I don’t think you should live here. I don’t know what else to say.
T.: I don’t know how to behave around an eight-year-old?
S.: That’s right.
T.: I think you don’t know how to behave around an eight-year-old.
S.: Are you out of your mind?

The movie is all of the things I love about small movies: quietly paced, populated with familiar people who behave like we might behave ourselves, and who are stuck in the same holes that real people are. It asks big questions, and shows how ineffective our answers are, and how little we know about what we believe and feel. It spits and crackles with real emotion, isn’t going for laughs or tears it hasn’t earned, and never comes full circle, though it makes a valiant effort, and ends up a pleasantly wobbly oval that doesn’t quite close just right.

Tuesday, November 8, 2005   

the blog and design portfolio of Jason Gurley. (Learn more.) This site has been around since 1998; me, since 1978. In 2005 I drove 3,000 miles to see a movie. 2009 is pretty aimless so far, but I'm sure I'll get around to something sooner or later.

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Lust, Caution
Double Indemnity
Iron Man
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
There Will Be Blood
Gone, Baby, Gone
Live Free or Die Hard
The Indian Runner
The Iron Giant
Contact
An Inconvenient Truth
X-Men: The Last Stand
Superman Returns
Enigma
Nobody's Fool
Look, Up in the Sky
Numb3rs
Mission: Impossible III
Heaven
The Abyss
The Constant Gardener
The Mosquito Coast
The Hustler
Limbo
Grizzly Man
The Verdict
Superman Returns
Elizabethtown
Battlestar Galactica
You Can Count on Me
Rolling Roadshow 2005
The American President
My DVD collection

01. dreaming of falling
02. marvelous descent
03. a conversation
04. the colors
05. huffnagle island
06. a hundred million
07. sixty-six stories
08. anyone earthbound
09. a girl named eleanor
10. a route obscure and lonely
11. a certain stillness
12. this is jack
13. wide flat lands
14. going home
15. girl unscrewed
16. slow rehabilitation
17. twenty-three stories
18. a far-off point
19. fifteen years quiet
20. a one-beer fella
21. luminescence
22. one-sided conversation
23. hearts big and stupid
24. nineteen seventy-eight
25. first light
26. a hundred years
27. too long to stop now
28. plainswept
29. a widower in training
30. spies and assets
31. thirty years and then some
32. leaping over couches
33. cricket song
34. eleanor's first kiss
35. like so much ballast
36. too much
37. the longest wait
38. the second ice storm
39. rocket summer
40. waiting
41. wax wings
42. breakup
43. tough beans
43. the heavy gray sea