Tremble…Sigh…Wonder…

By James Kenney

For starters, my nearly twenty a pop tickets to Edward Burns’ new film MILLERS IN MARRIAGE at the Regal Union Square provided I and the wife with a minuscule theater with admittedly exceptional sound and image, but a bizarre layout that meant the only traditional seats are way up front or in the very last row.  The better part of the seating has been hollowed out to make available spaces for wheelchair users and their companions, which is all well and good, but which made me feel blessed I was the first person to buy tickets for the Sunday 6:20 pm showing (the only show of the day of what is clearly a token pre-streaming run), as I grabbed the only two first-rate seats in the tiny theater.

A “full house” (of approximately 20) had shown up, perhaps fans of Burns’ work going back to the heady days of indie cinema, the 1990s, when Kevin Smith, Hal Hartley and Ed Burns could make films like The Brothers McMullen for like 75,000 bucks and actually get a high-profile release and media coverage.

Those days are long over, but other Keepers of the Flame such as I were out in big numbers, well, the high teens, except 80% of this motivated audience was packed in the two rows pressed up against the screen. An elderly woman in the very front row kept taking photos of the movie as it played, and the three rootless single white males with body odor problems who arrived (I imagine without tickets, sneaking in from another show) kept getting up and sitting back down. The one who wandered in and sat next to me without a ticket promptly fell asleep and snored noisily twice, the second time resulting in my whacking his arm and telling him to “stop snoring!” To his credit, he seemed to respect my message and kept the snoring to a minimum the next time he fell asleep.

Oh, and to our immediate left? A young Julianna Marguiles fan who had just seen the new Delia Ephron play Marguiles is in with Peter Gallagher (she had Playbill and souvenir poster in tow), and had raced down to Union Square to see her fave in MILLERS, alongside Burns, Campbell Scott, Gretchen Mol, Benjamin Bratt, Minnie Driver, Patrick Wilson and Morena Baccarin. Alas, MILLERS was an opportunity for women both young and old to play with their phones throughout the movie, but you know, she’s young, and wasn’t taking photos of the screen, just texting, etc. I guess in-theater phone usage is a built-in feature for those under thirty.

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But, oh yeah, the movie itself.  Not bad. It’s fine. Burns keeps churning them out, a true indie who gets notable actors from the Northeast corridor of these United States to repeatedly show up for his modest explorations of the human experience, this time a bunch of wealthy but aging New Yorkers who wonder What Might Have Been.  My wife noted that Scott, Burns and Bratt had all aged well, but she had a little more to say off-the-record about the appearance of the skilled actresses, noting the big screen and high-definition image did no favors for the sizeable facial work they’d had done. It’s no doubt tough to be a woman in Hollywood. She decided Gretchen Mol won the “most natural” looking of the female leads award, but if Burns has had any work done its hidden in the woolly beard he’s grown, perhaps to look more intellectual, as he’s also now a novelist, having penned  A KID FROM MARLBORO ROAD, about growing up Irish-American in New York.  A good read, nothing to grumble about, if you think you’ll like it you will, and if you think you don’t want to dwell on various Irish-American tropes, you might want to steer clear. I enjoyed it just fine, Burns arrives perhaps just above Ethan Hawke and fairly well ahead of Susanna Hoffs in the performer-turned-novelist rankings for me, although Hugh Laurie’s THE GUNSELLER is still tops in my private rankings of such things. God knows Burns isn’t pretentious in his word-slinging, nor too self-conscious.  Get to work on novel two!

Moving past his novel and his beard, as for Burns latest script and direction? Fine, it’s all fine, and those who snarkily complained on social media after various film festival screenings that they don’t care about the film’s “white people problems” certainly don’t have to see the film, although perhaps they do have to work a little harder to stop using fashionable but overused tropes, since they seem so hostile to Burns’ own fairly strong usage of cliché. I do note that after consistently providing working-class riffs on Woody Allen (in the era of all young turks aping Scorsese and Tarantino this was valiant, if not downright subversive), Burns does swim upstream a bit to focus on this well-to-do set of artists, authors and journalists that wouldn’t seem out of place in an Allen drama. Burns’ wealthy white people are more likely to make Better Than Ezra references than Allen’s characters, though.

But Burns does provide plausible dramatic representation here of a real thing, the regret and self-awareness of dissolution setting in as we all face the epiphany that we’re not getting out of here alive, and are also not writing the Great Novel or getting young girls to smile at us on the street anymore. No one in MILLERS IN MARRIAGE is pretending to be younger than they are, and the last-minute desperation in the characters’ efforts to pair up one last time in a relationship that might hold an erotic charge or fulfill some unsatiated desire from thirty years earlier rings pretty true to the 50-something typing this up, even if I don’t have upstate retreats or Soho lofts like they do. They recognize that unlike teenagers, their hyperbolic self-involvement is truly followed by The End of all Ends, so they better make some smart choices at this late date.

As with a lot of Burns, including his much happier (and well-worth seeing) recent SUMMER DAYS, SUMMER NIGHTS, it’s agreeable and expertly acted without being in any way transcendent. But seeing a Brother McMullen get old before our eyes does remind us that the Bell tolls for us all, etc. and so forth.  Other than getting that rarity, an actual recorded performance from the brilliant Campbell Scott (after blowing the world away in ROGER DODGER, Scott seems to have done all he can to NOT be noticed), I’d say check out SUMMER DAYS if you’ve only got time for one; it’s a cheery film with a nice soundtrack, with Burns nicely sliding into the John Mahoney role of cranky but loving dad.  But, on the other hand, you could do much worse than check out both.

Burns’ current value was reinforced this last Sunday by an endless stream of dreadful coming attractions preceding MILLERS featuring KRAVEN THE HUNTER and other Marvel-adjacent atrocities (featuring the likes of Florence Pugh, Julia-Louis Dreyfuss and Russell Crowe, all of whom should apologize and do an Edward Burns film as penance). They all look like exactly the same film down to their irritating CGI-driven trailers with the same exact dramatic beats, so bad that even the trailer for MICKY 17, the new film by Bong-Joon Ho, comes off just as witless and headache-inducing as everything else previewed. Burns’ best work came after his initial fame, with overlooked titles like THE GROOMSMEN and FITZGERALD FAMILY CHRISTMAS well worth checking out.  All lacking CGI, all lacking swordplay. I say yay.

I should note that there are no promotional images floating around for MILLERS, there’s no trailer on YouTube, no website or Facebook page. You’d think an indie success like Burns would have maintained his social media presence, he had several hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers on an account he constantly updated a few years ago that mysteriously disappeared. Certainly the best (free) publicity a famous indie like Burns could have is simple tweets letting people know his movies and novels are out. I suspect longstanding wife Christy Turlington caught him flirting in DMs and shut him down immediately. Just a theory, but it’s one I’m comfortable with.

So Mr. Burns, who has already another film shot in Ireland wrapped, FINNEGAN’S FOURSOME, I do heartily support you in your Cassavetes-like endeavors to keep shooting personal projects, however little the larger world cares. I’ll keep talking about you on social media even if you won’t/can’t, promise. I still pay attention to and appreciate your body of work, although I am getting a little nervous with this run of alliterative titles, Burnsie.

FITZGERALD FAMILY CHRISTMAS? MILLERS IN MARRIAGE? FINNEGAN’S FOURSOME?

Don’t get too cute. But I’m on your side, and anyone who values movies that endeavor to record the human experience should appreciate Burns’ thirty-year process of recording his own advance in years. If forehead sinews and unkempt beards can appear on the once-boyish Burns, which of us will escape such calumny?