Photos courtesy of Republic Pictures (a Paramount Pictures label)
MILLERS IN MARRIAGE– 3 STARS
There’s a conversation moment a little after 20 minutes into Edward Burns’ Millers in Marriage between two sisters that tilts a head and raises an eyebrow. Three-time Emmy winner Julianna Marguiles is the older sister, Maggie, talking to the younger Eve Miller, played by former Rounders and Boardwalk Empire star Gretchen Mol. The straightforward Maggie, beleaguered in a stale marriage and clearly venting, asks the more reserved Eve, “Do you ever fantasize about getting divorced?”
Maggie asks that personal question so casually. It’s as if she was wondering about a recipe or book recommendation a sentence prior and not the cataclysmic dissolution of a marriage. The verb choice of “fantasize” is a fascinating one as well. It’s true that amid a divorce rate that has steadily been between 40% and 50% in the United States, about 80% of divorcees remarry at some point, meaning renewed happiness is more than possible. Still, to wish for it like a winning lottery ticket is intriguing.
LESSON #1: WHAT BRINGS SOMEONE TO THOUGHTS OF DIVORCE?– What brings someone like Maggie to that fixation point? What makes her so resigned to the fantasy and glib enough to ask that of a fellow married person (even if it is her sister in a safe space)? What happens when the provocativeness of Maggie’s question churns up a wistful wave of self-reflection in Eve to gauge what it would take to entertain the notion of divorce herself?
Setting the Millers in Marriage stage some more, Maggie is a novelist riding a surge of consecutive bestsellers. She is married to Nick (Campbell Scott of Singles), a fellow well-regarded writer mired with writer’s block. The state of their marriage matches his downward creative doldrum, and it’s sapping the vivacity of Maggie’s high point. Eve is a retired 90s singer-songwriter who gave up her fulfilling trajectory to be a stay-at-home mom while her fellow rocker husband Scott (Aquaman series heavy Patrick Wilson) got to continue his jet-set, decadent, and alcohol-soaked career. At the moment, Eve finds flattery and amorous fascination when she’s tapped for a retrospective interview about her brief career by the appreciable music journalist Johnny (the silvered charisma of Benjamin Bratt, recently of Poker Face).
The third Miller sibling is Edward Burns’s artist Andy Miller. He’s currently separated from his mildly vindictive wife Tina (Deadpool squeeze Morena Baccarin), and quietly dating one of her former colleagues, the divorced fashion executive Renee (Good Will Hunting and Grosse Pointe Blank icon Minnie Driver). This collection of successful Lower Manhattanites intersects during a weekend stay away from the Big Apple at an upstate vacation town.
LESSON #2: SIGNS OF HEALTHY AND UNHEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS– Each fiftysomething character may be past their respective mid-life crises and manning empty nests, but they are encountering new domestic crossroads. Cross-cutting between the couples like a woven anthology, Millers in Marriage exposes festering laments and concerns that have transformed their home spaces. Within their circles, bedrooms carry jaded noises and dinner parties host examinations. Living rooms have become confessionals and private moments turn into ponderous breathers between combative confrontations. Signs of marital health, or lack thereof, are everywhere.
Assembling this esteemed cast of respected performers, Millers in Marriage pervades more and more audacious questions, even if they happen among what Nick calls “rich people and their champagne problems.” While everyone has their share of golden parachutes compared to commoners, the inquiries of who’s jealous, curious, sad, or happy—and with whom—carry plenty of pertinence. Each relationship reaches crucial decision points with those feelings, and the movie unveils who makes the right ones and who makes the wrong ones while Andrea Vanzo’s longing and steady piano score occupies the background.
Throughout the film, the emotional conduits—written by Ed Burns in his 14th directorial effort and first in five years since 2019’s barely-seen TIFF premiere Beneath the Blue Suburban Skies—wisely remain the three women. At every turn, the male characters trying to skate by and wring their hands of drama are stopped by their fiercely different personalities. Their feet are held to the fire, as they say, for the issues requiring necessary change. Mind you, it’s not that the women are perfect or unassailable. That’s far from the case. However, they are granted, through performance and screen time, stronger moral footholds.
Thanks to Gretchen Mol, Minnie Driver, and Julianna Marguiles, Millers in Marriage stages a performative pageant of strength and sentiment. Marguiles starts as the kind of take-charge shark we’ve come to know on television, but Burns gives her a slippery slope plotline that unsharpens her edge nicely. Gretchen has deserved plum lead roles like this since breaking taboos in The Notorious Betty Page twenty years ago. The same can be said for Minnie, who’s been saddled with too many supporting caretaker roles in the last decade. Seeing them stretch their talent and shine is a treat.
If this Millers in Marriage cast was half their age, carnal titillation producing fiery conflict would electrify a movie like this. Edward Burns has long had a higher film brow than that. Instead, the purpose was to showcase age and its connected challenges of exhausted love. The weathered attractions are weighty with tangible reality far removed from typical hot-and-bothered couplings. When one character offers the cocktail toast of “Here’s to the pleasures that failed to last and the dreams that didn’t come true,” you can’t help but raise your own glass and nod in agreement.
LOGO DESIGNED BY MEENTS ILLUSTRATED (#1283)
