A rarefied chamber piece for a small-town single mom, her pensive little boy, her nomadic no-account brother (their parents, as we're shown in a childhood prologue, were killed in an auto accident, and there's no indication of who filled that role afterwards), her soft-mannered hard-assed new boss at the bank, and a rekindled indecisive lover. The complaint of the brother about his hometown -- its smallness and narrowness -- could easily be turned against the movie as a whole. But something he says at another point, under an unwelcome grilling from the local clergyman -- that however unimportant his life may be in the overall scheme of things, it is important at least to him and to those close to him -- could be turned to the movie's defense. We the viewers get close to him, too, and get involved. The movie marks the directing debut of playwright Kenneth Lonergan (and, in a lighter mood, screenwriter on Analyze This and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle), who seems to enjoy the freedom on screen to compose in fragments instead of in Scenes and Acts, and who is prone to dump an unfair share of the workload onto his musical selections: Bach, Loretta Lynn, a whole heap of Steve Earle. Laura Linney (linked on the soundtrack with Loretta Lynn for no apparent reason except the sameness of their names) emerges as a kind of thespian Annie Oakley, quick on the trigger and a dead shot, challenging Meryl Streep's record for cramming the most acting into the smallest spaces. Mark Ruffalo, while well-versed in the ways of the slacker ("like totally, man"), is less persuasive as the harebrained brother, held back by his third-generation Brandoisms or second-generation Erik Estradaisms, and, through no fault of his own, by his complete physical dissimilarity to Linney: darkly Mediterranean to her Nordic frost. With Matthew Broderick (dependably deft as the persnickety bank manager deficient in People Skills), Rory Culkin, Jon Tenney. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd