Read @ Joe’s

The mid 1990s was a wild, wonderful time for indie cinema. The geeks were inheriting the earth as both Kevin Smith’s Clerks and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction debuted in 1994. Spike Lee was coming off his most ambitious film to date (Malcolm X) and started settling in with crime fiction (Clockers). Richard Linklater was past being Dazed and Confused and was making his trek into Before Sunrise. And in 1995, NYC filmmaker Edward Burns successfully debuted his indie romantic comedy about an Irish family living in Long Island, The Brothers McMullen – a film with frank dialogue, religious guilt, and the quest for true love. 

Title: The Brothers McMullen (1995) Director: Edward Burns Writer: Edward Burns Studio: Marlboro Road Gang Productions // Fox Searchlight Pictures IMDb Plot: Three Irish Catholic brothers from Long Island struggle to deal with love, marriage, and infidelity. Joe Says: Burns creates a charming and funny movie that succinctly captures a what-if-Woody-Allen-was-Irish feel with its drinking and remorse and wanting to do right by God.

The Brothers McMullen tells the story of three Irish brothers: Jack, Pat, and Barry. Jack (Pat Mulcahy) is happily married, Pat (Mike McGlone) is in a comfortable albeit loveless relationship, and Barry (Burns) doesn’t believe in true love. Throughout the course of the movie, Burns churns up his characters like they are Kerrygold. Jack has an affair, Pat discards the comfortable for the reckless, and Barry, possibly, abandons bachelorhood. The baked-in Irishness makes Burn’s recipe heavy with humor.

The Brothers McMullen is truly Nineties contemporaneous as Burns mixes in the rat-a-tat storytelling of Tarantino with the open-sex convos of Smith. He wraps this celluloid hipness around relatable, understandable, familial situations all umbrellaed with Catholic responsibility. His directorial style is as plain and candid as his dialogue. The stationary camera is solely there for the magnificent performances. The setting could be a backyard patio or a diner or a convenience store. What happens in that instance, in the here-and-now, with the realism of bad wallpaper and coaxial cable splitters setting the stage, is more important than movement. Burns keeps the speaking all Guinness frothy, too, brewed with dreams and fears and what ifs. Barry is cocksure and arrogant with his diatribes. He is always right, everyone else is phony, and Heineken is the perfect muse, until he meets Audrey. Pat, the youngest, doesn’t know what he wants but Susan already has his life charted in a three-bedroom bungalow scheme. His heart loves the church but his libido points him in other directions. And Jack, set and strong, soon becomes weak-willed and duplicitous. 

Burns creates a charming and funny movie that succinctly captures a what-if-Woody-Allen-was-Irish feel with its drinking and remorse and wanting to do right by God. The situations are cigarette-breath biting coupled with a strangling tragedy that turns darkly funny. Burns doesn’t so much as question the relevance of relationships in the 90s as he instead pushes for the need to one-up mediocrity and to break free from the safety of suburbia. And although sloppy and heavy-handed at times, he succeeds in creating a momentary escape. 

The movie opens at a funeral with Barry’s mom telling him that she is leaving for Ireland where her long, lost love waits. Breaking free sets the theme as Burns stretches the elasticity of it all – until he shows that when everything snaps back, life isn’t that bad. Even out on Long Island.