Defining Favourites: You Can Count on Me (2000)

Kenneth Lonergan's directorial debut explores broken people in dulled down America.

Photo: Paramount Pictures

Welcome to my Defining Favourites, a section dedicated to essays about films that I feel confident in calling favourites in some way or another - akin to Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” reviews. These essays are for paid subscribers, so if you would like to read more beyond the free preview, please consider subscribing.

Directed by Kenneth Lonergan
Screenplay by Kenneth Lonergan
Produced by Jeffrey Sharp, John Hart, Larry Meistrich, Barbara De Fina
Starring Laura Linney, Mark Ruffalo, Matthew Broderick, Jon Tenney, Rory Culkin
Premiere Date: January 21, 2000
Running Time: 111 minutes

You Can Count on Me is a movie that could only have been made within a small town setting, about people who’ve constantly made bad life decisions one after another. Being the feature film directorial debut of playwright Kenneth Lonergan, one can’t help but feel like we’ve known people who were like this. We’ve known people who find themselves stuck in a position where they can’t work through things alone and the people whom we rely on don’t have the answers we seek. Yet in the work of an artist like Kenneth Lonergan, the answers we seek probably might not ever be found. It’s part of why such works have only made a lasting impact, for Lonergan has always remained so steadfast in his portraits of people trying to make do with their own circumstances.

From the way that the film starts, we’re seeing a tragedy hit the Prescott family while they were children. Now adults, Sammy and Terry have grown distant from each other – and Sammy is a single mother, who has never left the childhood home. Meanwhile, Terry has been drifting all across the United States, without the slightest clue what he wishes to do next in his own life, but it seems like he’s able to get on by while getting into trouble with the law every now and then. The two of them have not spoken in months, so it’d already be life-changing to even have any sort of contact with one another for a little moment. Kenneth Lonergan doesn’t only explore the dynamics of a broken family within this drama, but he’s taking a very simple premise and making a very complex and layered drama out of what seems almost like nothing.