MILLERS IN MARRIAGE - Mark Reviews Movies

Millers in Marriage, Republic Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 20, 2025

Writer/director Edward Burns follows the romantic woes of three siblings in Millers in Marriage. It seems like an easy, character-based bit of drama, except that so much of it feels disconnected.

Those siblings, for example, never have a scene together. It's not as if they're estranged or anything, either, because Eve (Gretchen Mol), Maggie (Julianna Margulies), and Andy (Burns) are very much curious and concerned about each other's lives. They all live in New York City, at least for part of the year, but while pairs of them meet up in the country upstate for single scenes, there's never a moment when the movie gives us a sense that there is any real connection between all of them. The casting of three actors who look nothing like each other, by the way, doesn't exactly help matters, but that's a minimal concern compared to how disjointed the characters and story come across in Burns' script.

Instead, we spend time with each sibling on their own, as each one tries to figure out what to do next with his or her love life. Eve, a former musician whose disbanded rock group had a hit or two during the 1990s, is in a terrible marriage to Scott (Patrick Wilson), a manager of musical acts, who has promised to get sober a few too many times for Eve to believe him anymore. Sure enough, Scott pours himself a drink shortly upon returning home to the couple's apartment, after he didn't contact Eve for three days while on tour with a band.

As for Maggie, she's a successful author, currently finishing her newest book at a second home in upstate New York. Maggie is married to Nick (Campbell Scott), who's also a writer, but he's currently suffering from a sort of existential form of writer's block. Believing that he would have written "the Book" by now if he had it in him, Nick now just spends his days hanging around the house, refusing to go anywhere, focusing on cooking for him and his wife, and becoming sensitive whenever the subject of writing is raised.

Finally, there's Andy, an artist, who was recently married to Tina (Morena Baccarin), before she suddenly, in Andy's mind, announced that she wanted to separate. Since then, he has started dating Renee (Minnie Driver), a well-to-do publisher, whom he met when she was Tina's boss. Tina has discovered their relationship, by way of a very convenient expositional flashback, so the two have to navigate her attempts to sabotage the romance, while also figuring out what their romance actually entails and could mean for the future.

There's a feeling of hesitancy on Burns' part here, as if he has all of these characters, love stories, and connections in place but isn't certain how to push them forward. The Andy love triangle introduces a flashback conceit that turns out to make up a surprising amount of this narrative. We get it from Eve's story, as she recalls the time Scott showed drunk and aggressive to a piano audition one of their sons has for, presumably, a conservatory school or something. Some also appear later as Eve reconnects with Johnny (Benjamin Bratt), a handsome and charming music journalist who admits to having had a crush on her in the '90s—one that hasn't abated, apparently.

There are plenty in Maggie's story, too, as it's revealed that she and Dennis (Brian d'Arcy James), the caretaker of the local upstate properties, have been spending a lot of time together behind Nick's back. The affair isn't exactly convincing, but what should we expect from one that's invented for melodrama and is depicted entirely within the succinct framework of assorted flashbacks? Burns seems to believe that showing us how certain events happened in the past equates to giving us some insight into these characters and their relationships. From his own past, we know Burns is a smarter and occasionally more insightful filmmaker than that, since so many of his own movies revolve around characters talking and revealing themselves through dialogue.

Here, the characters say something, and Burns often awkwardly shows it to us. The present moment doesn't seem to matter so much to the filmmaker, but it's of great concern to these characters, as each sibling deals with his or her various romantic bonds and entanglements. Burns keeps pulling us out of those in order to explain what happened and when it happened, but that makes it very much the stuff of melodrama. He keeps the why of these characters and their behavior at a distance throughout the movie.

It's tough to really care about these characters, then, partly because they're all somehow extraordinarily successful artists within their respective fields but mostly on account of how shallow their assorted affairs come across. Millers in Marriage doesn't just keep the siblings at an odd distance from each other. By way of the slapdash writing in terms of characterization and structure, it also keeps these characters at a distinct distance from us.

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