Casual Comment about Laura Linney Reveals Moviegoer Milestone

You know what? In my last post I very casually remarked that watching "The High Cost of Living" reminded me of my first viewing of the actress Laura Linney. Why should such a reference make sense? I wrote it without thinking. Allow me to explain myself: Upon reflection, Laura Linney embodies a particular milestone in my personal moviegoing history (or, moviewatching, to be more accurate - but doesn't that sound bad? should it be my 'filmviewing' history? ugh. at least 'moviegoing' sounds good).

Prior to You Can Count on Me, I was not really a great viewer of independent films. Of course, I had seen some indie films before. In fact, I had seen some really good ones that no one else I knew had ever seen (for example, Afterglow, which was so dear to me that I watched it many times over, yet no one else had even heard of it).

But I was not an informed viewer of independent films; I didn't have any framework to evaluate them; I didn't have any knowledge of the "currency" they traded in. How can one begin to compare such nuanced "slice of life" movies like that when your frame of reference is "Titanic" or "A Few Good Men" or "Steel Magnolias" -- all movies that were very good, but were designed to reach the biggest possible audience?

Laura Linney was probably not the only one who helped turn the key for me, but over time she has become a symbol. A symbol of when I discovered what "good acting by an unknown" can LOOK like, can FEEL like. When I discovered how drama can be subtle. So this is what independent film comes down to for me: Good acting that doesn't rely on its audience. Good acting that is ONLY about the nuance of an emotion, and doesn't even bother with the obvious part of the emotion. Linney's face is capable of many more obvious emotions, as we saw with her hysterical grimace in "The Truman Show," or her collapsing romantic tears in "Love, Actually." But in "You Can Count on Me," the way she talks to her brother when he arrives in town (her judgmental squeals of "you did what?!" upon hearing he's been in jail and the little nods, nods, nods of her head when he asks for money as if to say "of course, of course, this is why you're really here") -- her actions in this scene do NOTHING to reveal the true nature of the character (who later in the film goes on to commit adultery with her boss and make all sorts of moral blunders, allowing her brother to witness her own confusion in a kind of role reversal) -- i.e. she does nothing that is obvious, nothing that is expected, throughout the entire film. It's not clear why the character does what she does and she, the actress, Linney, does not gauge her ability to perform a scene by how obvious it's going to be to you, the viewer. You might even watch the whole film twice through and never feel like you "get" the character she plays. But the character is intact and real, with or without you, and Linney knows that. I tend to think of independent film this way.

Well, I could go on and on about that one movie alone, but I won't. The point is that it marks a time in my life when several emotional 'filmviewing' doors were opened. And without Laura Linney's performance there, I'm not sure I ever could have understood some of the indie movies I came to relish later in life, like Swimming Pool or Waitress or Off the Map. (Or a hundred others.) I just kinda want to say "thank you" to Laura Linney for opening up my world!