I fratelli McMullen

There's a ton of things wrong with this film. The acting is wooden at best. The script has holes all through it. And worst of all, the film itself looks like it was developed at a Photomat! But there's something about this film that has heart. There's something about this film's performances that has heart. It's as if each actor involved really believed in the project and wasn't just "phoning it in". I don't think that Ed Burns will ever be able to recreate the magic of this film....But he's still one up on 99% of Hollywood. This is a great movie because it works without all the polish that we're all so used to in American cinema.

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.

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.

THE BROTHERS McMULLEN (1995) ***1/2 Edward Burns, Mike McGlone, Jack Mulcahy, Maxine Bahns, Elizabeth P. McKay, Shari Albert, Connie Britton, Jennifer Jostyn. Sort of an Irish-American Woody Allen flick but with style and originality: Burns (who stars, wrote and directed) filmed this on a budget at $20,000 and won The Sundance Film Fest's Jury Prize after being passed on every level. Three close and quarrelsome Irish/Catholic brothers from Long Island confront sex, sin, guilt, infidelity, commitment and finally love in this delightfully funny and smart slice of life.

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.