Millers in Marriage
Millers in Marriage
True to his nature, Edward Burns has always made it a point to get personal in all the films and television shows he has made as a writer-director. However, retaining similar authority as he had in his break out film “The Brothers McMullen” has often meant taking low budgets and younger casts and crews, which of course takes the product away from who he is now. In a market so devoid of any intelligent adult dramas, it is a pleasure for his fans to witness his comeback in “Millers in Marriage” as he returns to familiar ground having crossed over fifty.
“Scrabble has helped me find a stable woman my age who does not want children,” these are words Andy, Burns’ character, says to new partner Renee (Minnie Driver) who is understandably anxious about starting a family. They are at Renee’s ex-husband’s summer house, and according to the scale of “Millers in Marriage” that was certainly less devoid of poetry than anything else a person would want when Mae West says all that people want is peace.
Andy recently did not terminate his 15-year marriage, but he has surely been thankful that it came to an end. This was also because getting away from the fiercely protective Tina (Morena Baccarin) made life less challenging for him. If he wishes to remember it, he only has to talk to his younger sister Eve (Gretchen Mol), who is married to Scott (Patrick Wilson), a music manager who tends to neglect his call responsibilities while on the road during a tour for multiple weeks.
In relations of the other sister, Maggie (who was interpreted by Julianne Margulies), the things also do not go smoothly: her husband Nicky (Campbell Scott) is rather morose, ever since the time their children left house for colleges, still, she is not the type who draws frustration and rather prefers to bury it, unless one settles it in her fictional novels.
Apparently, all of the Millers are creative — or used to be. Eve was a frontwoman in a band until she and Schoonmaker were pregnant, and although it is not pertinent to the main plot, Burns does manage to provide some dry wit about the vicissitudes of a practicing profession: quite intimately. He is also self aware when Nicky passes over a draft of his wife’s new novel and comments: ‘It’s rich people with champagne problems.’ These words were not so hideous in the context of ‘Millers in marriage’ where noone is represented as being poor.
However, Burns goes beyond that by honestly reflecting on what individuals must sacrifice in order to achieve their personal, professional, and relational aspirations. The movie also provides a possible cipher for the director through Johnny (Benjamin Bratt), a rock- journalist who annoys Eve with a book he is working on and complains about how he is contemplating to leave N.Y. after pacing around amazed with the silence in a town dominated by young people. And as Eve is so keen to mention, perhaps it’s the correct audience he should be trying to grab in the first place.
In the film “Millers in Marriage”, there is a sense of how relaxed it is, however everyone is uptight towards one another which is quite odd. An odd mix of a cast that is seemingly relaxed and so all these characters play the role of people who are in a self-imposed rut, which Burns along with editor Janet Gaynor uses towards the film thanks to its slow, organic pacing built around conversations that serve to compare events with what someone is prepared to show or recollect.
This tension is what the three couples have to deal with when the time comes for reckoning, and in such circumstances where truthfulness is the commodity, romance is instantaneous from the dialogue which can occur between the characters, leaving the audience even more rivetted when the otherwise strong Burns has an equally strong ear for dialects and dialogues that are natively appropriate for the contextual air.
When it gets closer to the ending and certain choices need to be made, the film crosses over to the melodramatic, yet even if the characters are revealed to be in a movie, they are placed as movie players rather making trivial sufferings seem mattering. The conflicts may be quite timeless but there is comfort in realizing that some things do improve with age.
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- Genre: Drama
- Country: United States
- Director: Edward Burns
- Cast: Morena Baccarin, Patrick Wilson, Minnie Driver
