By Andrew Sarris

December 10, 2000 | 7:00 p.m

Kenneth Lonergan's You

Can Count on Me , from his screenplay, brightens the moviegoing year considerably without making too much of a fuss about it. Making virtuosity look easy and unobtrusive, however, is not the surest way to win Oscars and other prizes. Odds are that pictures markedly inferior to You Can Count on Me will win the big awards. Mr. Lonergan's creation, you see, is not an event attraction. Instead, it is simple and humble-albeit deceptively so-as it chronicles the lives and loves of a brother and sister orphaned at an early age by a delicately described automobile accident that killed their parents. By quickly laying out the initial premise of the plot, Mr. Lonergan deftly prepares us for an emotional escalation later, when the characters of the sister and the brother are more fully defined and tested under fire. Sammy (Laura Linney) is a control freak who raises her son Rudy (Rory Culkin) alone while holding down a responsible position in the town bank. At first, we don't know where Sammy's brother Terry (Mark Ruffalo) went to after leaving home or how Sammy came to be a single mother. A pattern of ellipses has been set into place to make the past fit together like a jigsaw puzzle with the ongoing future. A letter from Terry brings him into the mix; he's in the midst of a messy situation in Worcester, Mass., with a pregnant young woman for whom he cannot afford an abortion. His impending visit to Sammy is driven only by his need for money. Sammy is angry when she discovers, from Terry's own lips, what a shambles he has made of his life-and, worst of all, how comfortable he has been away from his sister and the small town in which they grew up, and in which their parents are buried. The plot thickens a bit when Terry learns that his pregnant girlfriend has attempted suicide and he decides to stay a little longer, much to Rudy's delight. Indeed, the scenes of male bonding between Terry and his nephew are made magical by the performances of Mr. Ruffalo and Mr. Culkin, and by the mutual yearning expressed eloquently in Mr. Lonergan's dialogue. Meanwhile, Sammy reveals a reckless streak of her own in her simultaneous affairs with her regular boyfriend Bob (Joe Tenney), who wants her to marry him, and Brian (Matthew Broderick), her pompous new boss at the bank, a man who is deceiving his own pregnant wife. All this dangerous juggling of affinities is achieved with an impressive comic flair that never diverts us from the tense central relationship between Sammy and Terry. Although they have spent most of their adult lives apart, they are still the most important figures in each other's emotional life. But Terry wears out his welcome with Sammy, first by sneaking Rudy into a pool hall late at night and then by taking him to his father. Sammy's seedy ex-husband, Rudy Sr., is remarried, and he disavows his own son and becomes embroiled in a violent brawl with the relentlessly mischievous Terry. Sammy wants to have it both ways by keeping Terry nearby, but away from Rudy. Terry decides to leave altogether, and Sammy is left desolate by his departure. Ms. Linney gives the best performance of her career to redeem the not entirely sympathetic role of Sammy, and Mr. Ruffalo is right up there with her by making a not entirely charming rascal ultimately sympathetic. I don't want to start a family feud by suggesting that Rory Culkin as Rudy surpasses anything his older brother Macaulay ever achieved, but …. All in all, You Can Count on Me demands a place on my 10-best list, which is becoming more and more crowded in this supposedly subpar year. Four Protagonists, Four Forms of Degradation Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream , from a screenplay by Hubert Selby Jr. and Mr. Aronofsky, based on the novel by Mr. Selby, is a movie I had to see twice before I decided I approved of it. After all, I hated Mr. Aronofsky's first movie, Pi (1998), and I disliked the movie based on an earlier novel by Mr. Selby, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989). Apparently, a little bit of nihilistic paranoia goes a long way with me. Besides, Requiem for a Dream is anti-Aristotelian to the core in that its four major characters slide down, down, down into the abyss without having begun from a high vantage point. Widowed Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn) of Brighton Beach is misled into thinking that she has been picked to appear on a popular television quiz show. Since she can't fit into her one elegant red dress, she begins experimenting with crash diets, ending with a steady dosage of pep pills. Her son Harry (Jared Leto), and his girlfriend Marion Silver (Jennifer Connelly), become addicted to crack cocaine after Harry goes into business with his best friend Tyrone C. Love (Marlon Wayans). As lower-class criminal fate would have it, Harry and Tyrone run afoul of the Mafia, which does not appreciate freelance competition in the drug trade on their turf. Meanwhile, Marion becomes so desperate for drugs that she begins bartering her body for a fix. Four protagonists, four forms of degradation, and no relief in sight. Yet the movie is actually exhilarating because of the director's kinetic energy and avant-garde fragmentation. I have never seen a movie about the drug problem that is so radically cautionary. Some of my students seem to think that the horror-show spectacle is somewhat overdone. I happen to believe that the so-called war on drugs has been a bigger disaster than Prohibition ever was. After all, during Prohibition no one went to prison simply for consuming an alcoholic beverage; what was illegal was the traffic in alcohol. If everyone who imbibed alcohol during Prohibition was placed in prison, millions of people would have had criminal records. As it is now, the drug laws have become an efficient way to incarcerate a large percentage of black males. I wonder if that is what Congressman Charles Rangel had in mind when he signed on for the Rockefeller drug laws? Still, Requiem for a Dream does not strike me as an assault on the drug trade from the right. Mr. Aronofsky and Mr. Selby are clearly men of the left, with a bone to pick with the establishment. Somehow we are led to believe that it may be society's fault that Sara Goldfarb worships the mass media to such an extent that she becomes hopelessly deluded about her chances to turn her life around by appearing on television. "All You Need Is a Dollar and a Dream" is the propaganda the establishment pours out to seduce the proletariat with dreams of great riches, to be obtained by gambling on the lottery at far greater odds than those offered by the mob in the quaint old days of the numbers racket. But is it edifying to watch victims of mass delusion sink to the bottom? And what is the alternative to these foolish courses of conduct? Lives of patience and quiet desperation? There is no movie there. On the other hand, is the entertainment to be derived from the downward trajectory of the four co-protagonists in Requiem for a Dream a form of audience sadism? Perhaps. Yet I felt something closer to pity and compassion the second time I saw the film than I had the first time. The sheer emotion expressed in the delusional scene in which Sara hugs Harry, and pours out all the pent-up feelings she has bottled up during all her years of loneliness, moved me perhaps more than it should. If enough members of the Academy see Requiem for a Dream -despite its NC-17 rating-Ellen Burstyn should be an odds-on favorite to win an Oscar. She plumbs the depths of despondency as no Oscar nominee before her has. She suffers and she suffers and she suffers. What more does the Academy want? Mr. Leto, Ms. Connelly and Mr. Wayans are excellent as well, but they don't have a chance for a nomination because they start out enjoying getting high, and they never really consider getting counseling. Ms. Connelly is doubly cursed for her vivid carnality, which still ruffles the rating board's feathers more than either illegal drug consumption or profane language. Viewers with a serious interest in the art of the cinema are hereby advised to see Requiem for a Dream . A Big Fat Kiss to Hitchcock Lou Ye's Suzhou River , from his own screenplay, has been publicized as an homage to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), but it is far from being a slavish imitation like the recent disastrous remake of Psycho (1960). Indeed, Mr. Ye subverts the Hitchcock original as much as he celebrates it. The world of Suzhou River -the metaphorical bloodstream of Shanghai-is full of criminal activity, but there is no murder mystery to be solved as there is in Vertigo . There is instead a kidnapping, a possible suicide, a romantic quest and a case of mistaken identity. Mr. Ye belongs to the sixth generation of Chinese filmmakers, who have rejected the quest for Chinese authenticity that characterized the work of the fifth generation. Shanghai is clearly a more populous and less orderly city than Hitchcock's San Francisco, but the intensity of romantic obsession is the same in both films. Mr. Ye constructs his narrative around the first-person viewpoint of a voyeuristic cinematographer who ends up being skeptical about the very story he is telling. Yet he finds himself losing his sweetheart because she senses that he is not capable of the single-minded romantic and sexual commitment of the character in the story. Suzhou River is the latest manifestation of a creative explosion that is now taking place throughout the Far East. We are back in the exciting days of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1951) and Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (1953), but now Japan must share honors with China, Taipei, Hong Kong and Korea. Who knows where it will end?