A big winner at Sundance, this directing debut by novelist-scriptwriter Kenneth Lonergan has “little” written all over it. It’s a little film about the little problems of a little family in a little town in upstate New York. A kind of benign version of Shadow of a Doubt, it revolves around a young single mother (Laura Linney) who, vaguely dissatisfied with her life, longs for her only family—her charming, feckless irresponsible younger brother (Mark Ruffalo) to come home and pep up her life. Which, ultimately, he does. Nothing’s really wrong with this movie. The structure is sound, the acting assured, and the payoff all the steadier for its modesty. The characters are carefully limned for realism, with just the right sprinkling of the unexpected to keep things interesting. Linney is the responsible one, but she’s still capable of kicking over the traces and having an affair that would seem to ignore every moral, strategic, and personal consideration, and Ruffalo is prone to attacks of familial reliability toward his young nephew, even if his parenting takes some rather iconoclastic turns. Yet somehow everything’s a little too painstakingly doled out—every excess has its counterbalance, every disillusionment its epiphany. Lonergan’s validation of big-minded small-town life has been neatened up to the point of blandness. 109 min.