DVD of the Week: You Can Count on Me

Kenneth Lonergan’s second feature, “Margaret,” which received a too-brief and under-publicized release this fall, is one of the year’s cinematic treasures. His first feature, “You Can Count on Me,” from 2000, which I discuss in the clip above, is similarly astonishing. For Lonergan, the cinema is itself an astonishment, with its power to see—and, indeed, to see into—the stuff of daily life. What is, for many filmmakers, a given—the transmission of a story that could happen in life, involving people one could know—is, for Lonergan, a miracle. He reinfuses the most familiar of methods with a new sense of wonder; his moments, luminous fragments of life, also take their place in the world and convey a sense of the splendid and terrifying grandeur of cosmic order, even in their apparently intractable disorder. His two movies offer proof that the source of artistic originality isn’t technical innovation or formal preconception but something that even an atheist might best describe as the soul.