The Family McMullen ★★½
When The Brothers McMullen was released in 1995, its writer-director-star Edward Burns was swiftly anointed “the new Woody Allen” (younger readers may be surprised to learn it was intended as a compliment).
Shot in his family home on weekends over the course of eight months for a production budget of just $US25,000 (the cost of the film stock), with a cast acting for free, the drama about an Irish-American family in New York’s Long Island was guerilla indie filmmaking at its finest.
The Family McMullen attempts to tap into the magic of Edward Burns’ debut feature 30 years ago.Credit: HBO Max
Equally myth-making was its emergence into the world. Burns was working at the time in a junior role at the TV show Entertainment Tonight, and when Robert Redford came in for an interview, the young hustler slipped him a copy of his film. Redford watched it, invited Burns to screen his rough cut at Sundance, and there it was snapped up by the newly hatched Fox Searchlight studio. And a career – now 20 films in as director, twice that as actor – was promptly born.
Jack Mulcahy, Edward Burns, Maxine Bahns and Michael McGlone in The Brothers McMullen.Credit: Fox Searchlight
Thirty years on, Burns has now returned to the mine where he first struck gold: family (specifically, a fictionalised version of his family). Sad to say, though, the seam has been largely tapped out.
What once seemed fresh and charming now feels rehearsed and rehashed. The Family McMullen has the air not of indie cinema but of a Hallmark movie. It even has the holiday-season setting (it opens and closes with Thanksgiving dinners, one year apart). The only thing missing is ugly sweaters (though they do get a mention).
Burns plays Barry, the middle McMullen brother, a twice-divorced father of two adult kids, “perfect” Patty (Halston Sage) and “terrible” Tommy (Pico Alexander). Michael McGlone is back as Patrick, the youngest McMullen boy, on the brink of his own divorce (from the unseen Leslie, with whom he ran off at the end of the original film).
The eldest of the brothers, Jack (played 30 years ago by Jack Mulcahy), is dead, from cancer. He’s survived by Molly (Connie Britton), who hasn’t had a boyfriend since her cheating husband died (in part, apparently, because of the cheating). But that doesn’t prevent her from giving dating advice to her niece, Patty, who’s just announced her engagement to Terence Joseph (Bryan Fitzgerald), the damp squib boyfriend she collected at law school and slotted neatly into her life planner.
You can’t marry the only person you’ve ever slept with, Aunt Molly insists. That way lies infidelity. Barry agrees, mostly because he can’t stand TJ. Tommy agrees, mostly because he’s never met a woman he’s serious about (well, you can guess what’s coming on that score…)
The wheels are set in motion quickly enough for a cavalcade of romantic, sexual and familial complications. And in that, it does indeed have a faint echo of a certain slice of Woody Allen’s oeuvre. What it doesn’t have is the sharpness of insight, the crackling dialogue, or the existential angst that underpinned even his lightest work.
The Family McMullen isn’t exactly terrible, but nor is it anything to write home about. Suffice it to say that if this were Burns’ first film, it might also have been his last rather than merely his latest.
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