You Can Count on Him

This past week, I watched the Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray edition of Kenneth Lonergan’s 2000 drama You Can Count on Me, one of the best—the most soulful, the least sentimental—American independent films of the last quarter-century.

When I first saw the film, I was 17 years old and both of my parents were, blessedly, still living. This fact is consequential, since the film begins with the sudden, shocking orphaning of its lead characters, Terry and Sammy Prescott. When their parents perish in an auto accident, the siblings look to be perhaps under 12—young enough, at least, to have required the presence of a babysitter while Mom and Dad were enjoying what seems to have been a date night in their small, peaceable, and verdant town in upstate New York. The babysitter is the one who receives the grim news from the sheriff, who never speaks on screen the words he has been sent to say: Lonergan, not for the last time in the film, cuts away before we hear anything.

Nor do we hear the funeral sermon delivered to Terry and Sammy at their parents’ funeral. Instead, as the opening credits start to roll by, Lonergan cues up the film’s theme (selections from Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion”) while a minister preaches from the pulpit and Terry and Sammy, comforting each other in a pew, listen through silent sobs. By omitting the substance of the sermon, Lonergan could be accused of minimizing or dismissing whatever Gospel message it contained, but I think that’s wrong. When we next meet Sammy, now an adult played by Laura Linney, she is seen crouching near her parents’ side-by-side gravestones. Sammy has come through the decades devoted, pious, and, in fact, a faithful attendee at her Methodist church—the same one in which her parents were commended to the Lord’s mercy. 

Sammy has figured out the rudiments of living despite her parents’ deaths. She has held onto the sprawling house in which she was raised—the same house we see the sheriff pulling up to in the opening—and she has also held onto a decent job in what looks to be a town with fairly limited prospects. She pays the bills as a loan officer at a tiny bank branch. Linney, who earned an Oscar nod for her performance, conveys prudence, sturdiness, wisdom. As the film opens, the only indication that Sammy has had moments of irresponsibility is the fact that she is a single mother: She is raising her little boy Rudy (Rory Culkin) without the presence of his father, who seems to have been a useless gadabout. Yet, as stated, Sammy takes Rudy to church—which, in the context of a modern American movie, is very close to being a radical act.

What struck me upon seeing the film as a teen is the degree to which Sammy has absorbed the horrible blow delivered to her in childhood. Even though I was on the edge of adulthood at the time, I could not personally imagine summoning the perseverance (or receiving the grace) necessary to continue in the absence of not one but both parents. To me, Sammy and Terry’s situation seemed hopeless, so Sammy’s outcome—her tranquility—seemed almost unbelievable. Back then, it was far easier for me to imagine the fallout of such a loss, which Lonergan embodies in the character of Terry (played as an adult by Mark Ruffalo). 

Some critics have compared Terry to the Prodigal Son, but this Prodigal Son returns home not to his father but to his sister, and in contrast to the Prodigal Son, he gives no indication of having been in any way chastened by his mistakes. He is unmarried and childless, and to the extent that he has a trade, it appears to be in construction, but one senses that this, too, is a matter of expediency: He can likely pick up construction jobs easily and with few questions asked. He speaks of having had a happy stint in Alaska and a troubled stretch in Florida, where he did a term in jail following a bar fight for which he, of course, acknowledges no responsibility. He smokes marijuana freely—and this is in a movie made in an era in which use of that noxious drug was still a major social taboo (and crime).

Because it would be years before I lost my father, and even more years before I lost my mother, I was spared knowing whether an early loss of my parents would have turned me more into Sammy or Terry. But seeing this beautiful movie again, what struck me is how much either fate would have been a choice: Terry has declined the benefits of family, profession, or church—the very things that seem to have provided a pathway for Sammy. 

By no means is Sammy perfect, but she is conscious of her imperfections, indeed, her sins: After she has recklessly (and inexplicably) entered into a romance with her ill-tempered married bank manager (Matthew Broderick), she visits her minister and begs him to spare her the psychological mumbo jumbo that she (and we) associate with the Protestant Mainline. “Maybe it was better when you came in here and they screamed at you for having sex with your married boss—that they told you what a terrible thing it was, they were really mean to you,” Sammy says. “Maybe it would be better if you told me that I was endangering my immortal soul, and if I don’t quit, I’m going to burn in Hell.” This scene, like much of the movie, is lightly comic, but Lonergan is in no way poking fun at Sammy’s striving for rectitude and yearning for forgiveness—he loves her, and her sincerity, too much for that.

As it becomes clear that Terry’s continued presence in Sammy’s life is upsetting the peace she has attained, she encourages him to leave. Perhaps, like Huck Finn, Terry is not fit for civilization. As they exchange goodbyes at a bus stop, Lonergan comes close to having Sammy speak the phrase in the film’s title. Terry says something about the mantra that they always repeated to each other when they were children, but before Sammy can say “You can count on me,” Lonergan ends the scene. This time, though, I think he refuses the line because, while it is a nice sentiment, its expression of sibling devotion might give the audience the wrong idea. 

Terry is no better for having Sammy in his life, and Sammy is plainly better off without having Terry in hers. “You can count on me” suggests that people can save other people, but Sammy is proof that the only thing we can count on is God—the reason that this film starts in the church, returns to the church, and makes such a big deal of the church throughout, even if “the church,” in this case, is rather wan and insufficient. There is simply no other explanation but a divine one for Sammy’s sanity, especially as compared to Terry’s restiveness. The title is intentionally misleading; don’t listen to it—listen to the “St. Matthew Passion” we keep hearing on the soundtrack. 

In 2023, after I lost my mother, I quickly determined that the only thing for me to do was to go to church. I did not know it at 17, but this was the greatest lesson of You Can Count on Me: You can’t count on me, nor I you, but you can count on Him.

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