The Brothers McMullen

I wound up watching the movie by accident and it turned out to be an experience much like passing road kill: It's so horrid you can't look away.

And because it was so awful, I thought it might be fun to read a few reviews of it (reading reviews of bad movies is somewhat cathartic; you watch something awful and then let someone else vent about your wasted time....). What I found here was somewhat unbelievable. Somebody actually thought it had some redeeming features. It doesn't.

This film did not just have a surfeit of uninteresting characters who spoke extraordinarily turgid dialogue (one character says to the other "I don't think we should see ONE ANOTHER for awhile...." Nobody, really nobody, ever says ONE ANOTHER except in church.) It was also woodenly acted, nonsensically directed and had a plot so boring I kept switching to Tony Robbins infomercials for excitement. Shoestring budget or not, there's no excuse for inflicting this kind of movie on the paying public. Okay, I didn't actually pay to see it because it was on Bravo, but I paid my cable bill and that should count for something.

Bottom line is that this movie isn't funny, isn't sad, isn't thought provoking and isn't interesting. It is annoying.

I never saw "The Brothers McMullen" in the theater, but I just watched it on video. I have to say that I liked it in spite of its flaws. It just had this superficial, breezy feel to it, like it's really not a movie but a pilot for a sit-com. All it's missing is the laugh-track.

The stories about the three brothers were well done, especially Barry's story (the middle brother). But I kept thinking the most interesting character in this story is the dead father, and he's not even in the movie. The brothers mention their father several times, usually in some disparaging way. You don't find out many facts about him, except that their mother never loved him. Apparently the sons didn't love him either.

The three brothers are desperate, each in their own way, to not end up like their father. The dead Mr. McMullen was characterized as an alcoholic, wife-abusing, stern and unhappy man. And yet Mr. McMullen had no trouble committing to one woman, which apparently Barry can't manage to do. Mr. McMullen remained faithful (apparently) in a 35 year marriage and raised 3 sons, which oldest son Jack can't bring himself to do. Mr. McMullen remained true to his religious and cultural upbringing, which youngest son Patrick is about to turn his back on when he splits for California.

So maybe that father wasn't such a failure after all. The sons won't realize this until they become husbands and fathers themselves. But they haven't reached that point yet, they're still growing up and figuring things out. It's nice to see how they help each other and take turns giving "parental" advice to each other.

I'd like to see this same story with these same characters, told 20 years before, and 20 years after the time of this movie. I'd like to meet the mother in Ireland as she greets her American grandchildren. Now that would be an interesting sequel.

I just finished watching this on TV. The story is about several weeks in the lives of three bothers. Circumstances (what they are is unimportant) have caused the two younger bachelor brothers to move in with their older married brother and his family. The script explores the relationships between three loving Irish Catholic American brothers, each with a distinctive personality, and the relationships each has with the women in their lives. It's about real love and romance (not the sappy romantic comedy type), fears of commitment, and the twists and turns these men go through in dealing with that aspect of their lives.

Their Catholicism has a lot to do with the story. At one point Patrick says to his Jewish girl friend, "I go to Church every week; you go to Temple only once or twice a year." She replies, "Yes, but your religion is crazy." Although the most religious of the three, Patrick, goes against the Church's teachings in that he uses condoms; but, he worries about going to Hell should he commit other serious sin.

Marriage to all of them means a life-long commitment. Their mother's life set the standard for them. She had lived 35 years in a forced, loveless marriage until her husband passed away. That freed her to go to the man she had been in love with when circumstances caused her to marry the boys' father. Abortion was out of the question, as was divorce.

Ed Burns is credited with writing and directing the film and he also is very credible as the middle brother. While the entire cast made their characters seem real, the actor who in my mind stood out is Mike McGlone, who plays Patrick, the youngest brother who has a kind of altar boy personality. Perhaps Ed Burns' choice of camera angles gets some of the credit for making his performance particularly memorable, but McGlone brought something special to that part.

EDWARD BURNS is the writer/producer/director/actor of this charming piece of casual film-making on a shoestring budget that he turned out twelve years ago, obviously based on characters he cares about and knows intimately. It has the intimate immediacy of MARTY, another such tale about a lonely Brooklyn butcher looking for true love and the right marriage prospect to end his bachelor days.

In THE BROTHERS McMULLEN we have MARTY compounded by three--namely, the Irish brothers on Long Island who seem to indulge in endless dialog about life, love and the pursuit of happiness while sipping their favorite beers, each involved in a troublesome relationship that has them questioning their inner conflicts born by a Catholic conscience.

It's not exactly up to the Woody Allen standard of such tales, but the dialog is fresh enough and natural, the modest settings are appropriate for the story and the jaunty Irish music on the soundtrack does its job.

Nothing complex here. Just a warm, engaging, occasionally funny tale of average guys struggling with their fixed ideas of moral values, each unable to come to terms with inner conflicts--and two of them simply unable to make commitments to the women they love.

The film is really carried by the three brothers: EDWARD BURNS as the one least able to commit, and JACK MULCAHY and MIKE McGLONE as his troubled siblings.

Summing up: Nothing really special, but it did win a couple of awards at film festivals.

'The Brothers McMullen', written, directed by and starring Edward Burns (on an extremely low-budget), invites us into the cosy relationship between three Irish-American brothers and their own relationships with God and members of the opposite sex. It is a conventional wisdom that a good story needs a beginning, a middle and an end, yet 'The Brothers McMullen' seems to be all middle - and engagingly so. Burns gives us a glimpse into the lives of these three brothers as they struggle to find their way through personal emotional turning points and re-evaluate their belief systems. The film is dominated by perceptive, sensitive and realistic dialogue throughout. The dilemmas of these three brothers are instantly recognisable to anyone in their twenties or thirties, their inner conflicts easy to identify with. This film is beautifully acted, and particularly likeable is Mike McGlone as the youngest brother who desperately tries to hold on to what he believes is his genuine Catholic conviction whilst searching for 'true love'. Burns' script is witty, warm, honest and wonderfully unpretentious. Burns himself turns in a great performance of the ever-maligned man who is 'afraid of commitment', yet somehow manages to remain intensely appealing and prevents his character from appearing to be a cliché. A rare gem among contemporary movies - one which is fuelled by words and not actions. Refreshing.