Director: Edward Burns
Writer: Edward Burns
Stars: Gretchen Mol, Julianna Margulies, Minnie Driver
Synopsis: Three middle-aged couples come to grips with universal questions about marriage and fidelity, professional success and failure, and the challenge of finding a second act.
While it’s certainly not impossible for movie studios to make and/or release proper dramas for adults these days, it seems far more difficult for them to ensure that their hired guns are able to execute the mission at hand. If Millers in Marriage is the litmus test, the latter doesn’t merely “seem” to be the case: It’s a fact. The latest effort from multihyphenate Edward Burns – who has written, directed, produced, and acted in all 14 of his features – only works if you’re willing to accept the signature wine-soaked mélange of sex, affluence, and well-furnished homes with open concept floor plans that Burns has made the principal pillar of his artistic career at face value. Dig any deeper and you’ll start to twitch, one soap opera-worthy line of dialogue at a time.
Perhaps there’s a sliver of charm to one man’s insistence on writing entire scripts that sound like matured variations of the classic “You’re giving up on your dream, son!” refrain, but there would certainly be more to appreciate if this slice of life story wasn’t so lifeless. Millers in Marriage, like most of Burns’ features, is a drama focused on relationships, with those at this tale’s center being that between three siblings (the Millers) and their individual partners. All involved are artists of some sort, which naturally make them the foremost authorities on love and the very concept of intellectualism, though… gee, how do I put this… none of them should ever be allowed to talk about either topic, nor many others. Burns plays Andy, a painter who recently separated from his wife, Tina (Morena Baccarin), and entered a relationship with the same ex’s former colleague, Renee (Minnie Driver, the best part of the film). The trouble, wouldn’t you know it, is that Tina still captures part of Andy’s attention, causing a deceit-laden rift in his burgeoning romance with the new woman in his life, the one who knows what she wants.
Elsewhere, the second Miller, Maggie (Julianna Margulies), is enjoying the life of a successful novelist, one who has just finished her latest manuscript, and it’s all but guaranteed to be next summer’s hottest beach read. Her husband, a fellow writer named Nick (Campbell Scott), can’t get out of his own head, thus spinning his wheels in a writer’s block rut that proves difficult to escape. “Nick not writing is like Nick’s heart not beating,” Maggie notes – with a straight face, mind you – early on in the film, but she also doesn’t seem to mind being the more prolific half of their relationship. She doesn’t mind the praise that comes her way, specifically from Dennis (Brian d’Arcy James), a friend with whom she once slept once, especially when things with Nick are on shaky ground. The latter’s snarky attitude towards Maggie’s writing never goes unnoticed; Nick’s work “takes precision and focus,” he says, while Maggie can just spin mindless tales about horny Manhattan moms with “trainers they wanna fuck.” In other words, they’re the poster children for supportive partnerships.
Finally, we have Eve, passionately portrayed by Gretchen Mol in the heftiest role of the three Millers. Once a promising singer-songwriter, Eve left the indie musician life behind when she got pregnant and married Scott (Patrick Stewart), her then-manager and now-tumor of a hubby whose rampant alcoholism is used more as a deliberate way to push the two apart than a potential reason for them to come together. That would never work, though, as there’s zero doubt that he is a more effective bully than he ever was a husband or manager. The counter offensive to Scott’s poisonous presence is Johnny (a charming Benjamin Bratt), a music journalist who takes every opportunity to remind Eve that he had a crush on her back in the day, yet given that not-so-subtle approach to igniting a flame, it doesn’t appear that this infatuation ever dissipated, at least not fully.
Occasionally, these folks all come together for a dinner, but it’s more likely that they’ll be seen in twos, either sharing a bottle of vino or enduring over-the-phone chit chats that extend well into the night. All of their relationships, like clockwork, tend to be on the verge of changing, being threatened, or being questioned, sometimes all at once. Yet while decisions are certainly made by the Millers and their significant others through this interwoven triptych, the film itself exists in a stagnant, “on the verge” state. The characters in Millers in Marriage don’t develop so much as they exist on paper, and just the first page, the one in which they are cleanly described and, if we’re lucky, given a hair color so we can conjure up some image in our mind. The single blessing that viewers are afforded in this case is that they are viewers, not readers. Otherwise, they’d be up a creek without a paddle, if they even elected to get in the boat in the first place.
To be fair, things do happen over the course of Millers in Marriage’s two-hour runtime, but things of consequence? Let’s not kid ourselves. This is a film by the talented, pleased-to-be-aimless Edward Burns, a meandering stroll on Central Park West where we aren’t even afforded the excitement of getting mugged. In his Irish Catholic cinematic worlds, responsibilities are optional, dreams are a must (as long as they aren’t too detailed), and romantic crises are mandatory. But the thing Burns fails to understand about including said plights in his films is that in order to be interesting, it’s imperative to be invasive. One would assume that he can’t continue to probe without ever going so far as to puncture, yet Millers in Marriage exists. (“He can’t keep getting away with this!” etc.) As far as this particular viewer goes, the umpteenth crack at this Wile E. Coyote-esque viewing journey simply has to be the last, for sanity’s sake. Hey, at least it’s not my dream I’m giving up on.
