Shots In The Dark. - Review - movie review

THE AMERICAN DREAM--FULFILLED AND NOT-SO FULFILLED

We're so used to seeing extraordinary people in Hollywood films (or, at least, stars pretending to be ordinary) that when an American movie honestly depicts the travails of someone we might quaintly term "regular," the result is almost exotic. So it is with Raymond De Felitta's Two Family House and Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count On Me, a pair of independent fall releases that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Both films evocatively depict the quotidian struggles of a working stiff--no matter that one of them is portrayed by the radiant Laura Linney.

If each film deals with authentic problems, neither is an immersion in gritty realism. Two Family House, which is about a factory machinist, Buddy Visalo (Michael Rispoli), who wants to better himself in working-class Staten Island in the '50s, is suffused with lyricism. Plainly rendered, You Can Count On Me is a contemporary story about a single mother, Sammy, whose world is turned upside down when her drifter brother comes to live with her and her son, but the casting of Linney adds a tint--if only a tint--of B-list movie star glamour to a humdrum world. Linney is an actress who has stayed fresh and interesting because she hasn't been wolfed up by celebrity, and she blends seamlessly into the small-town upstate New York world Lonergan creates. But then it's reasonable to assume that America's burbs are dotted with beautiful women who missed the opportunity to get out, or who never aspired to.

Buddy is cut from the same cloth as the decent, ugly Bronx butcher played by Ernest Borgnine in Marty (1955). Although he's an ignorant schlubb at times, Buddy is better looking than Marty--and God endowed him with a silky croon that attracted a talent agent at the tail end of World War 2. But Estelle (Kathrine Narducci), Buddy's fiancee, an insecure woman unhealthily tied to her parents and her girlfriends, threatened to call off their wedding if he pursued his dream to become a singer. He complied, setting a tragic precedent for their relationship. Over the following eleven years, as Buddy worked his guts out to own his own home and bar, in which he could croon to his heart's content, Estelle routinely sabotaged his efforts.

Two Family House is narrated retrospectively by Buddy's heir. Never seen as an adult, he turns up a third of the way into the film as the black baby born to the Irish immigrant girl (Kelly Macdonald) whom Buddy finds living upstairs in his dilapidated house with her abusive, drunken (and white) husband--and whom he finds himself courting after Estelle drives the miscegenating miss away. The narrative turns eventually on whether or not Buddy can reject the casual racism of his wife and her friends. But the movie's power resides in its effortlessly achieved nostalgia for its frustrated protagonist's workaday existence, briefly interrupted by one resplendent afternoon of crooning, dancing, and kissing. This, the film says, is what we remember about our lives in later years--the hard times and the occasional epiphanies that enable us to survive them.

In You Can Count on Me, Sammy has given up on the American Dream, though one suspects she never had the chance to nurture it. The movie begins, very powerfully, with the car crash deaths of her and her brother Terry's parents. We see the kids fleetingly, barely able to comprehend what has happened to them, and then the movie shoots forward into the present. Sammy has married, had a son, dumped her deadbeat husband, and accepted her responsibilities. She works at a bank, goes to church, and occasionally to bed with an attentive man (Jon Tenney) who doesn't fulfill her sexually or emotionally. When the well-meaning but feckless Terry comes to stay, he trails with him years of bitter experience, including a spell in jail. It quickly emerges that, whereas Sammy has done the best she can to overcome the psychological damage of the past, Terry has yielded to victimhood. As he takes Sammy's impressionable young son under his wing, her ordered--in fact, boring--life gets a much needed jolt of reality, but it is a jo lt too far.

Not that Sammy is perfect. She embarks on a reckless fling with her truculent, married new boss (Matthew Broderick) and we learn that she was wild in her youth--we get a complete picture of a woman who has tried to fill the hole in her heart and accepted that she probably never will. Linney reins in her more actressy tendencies to give the kind of thoughtful performance that should be remembered when it comes time to dish out the Oscars. What one remembers about Terry, expertly played by Mark Ruffalo, is his pleading puppy-dog eyes and his cajoling whine. There is no nostalgic glow or promise of resolution here--just the knowledge that, in the ragged future, a sister will be there for her brother. Two Family House and You Can Count On Me are necessarily dependent on melodramatic incidents, but each invites us to wallow in everyday situations and makes us think about our own mistakes and misfortunes, and the compromises and unpleasant decisions that adults have to make if they are to go on. They are not trans porting films, but films about the daily grind flecked with moments of hope and humor. They are a little bit like life.