Ed Burns Reflects on Gen-X Stories, From ‘The Brothers McMullen’ to ‘Millers in Marriage’
variety.comTodd Gilchrist editor “In the nineties, there were hundreds of movies being made about Gen-Xers,” says Ed Burns. He should know: as the writer-director of “The Brothers McMullen,” “She’s the One” and “No Looking Back,” he was the one making them.
After 30 years and a lot of growing up, he’s drawing a fresh pour from that well for his 14th film, “Millers in Marriage,” the story of three siblings navigating life and love — no longer as angst-filled, still unproven twentysomethings, but grown-ups now hovering on the precipice of middle age. “The coming-of-age stories we made our way through our twenties and thirties were these character-driven looks at relationships and careers,” Burns tells Variety. “But now I’m in my mid-fifties, and I was thinking about that time as another coming-of-age moment.” In the film, which premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival, Burns plays an artist embarking on a romance with one of his ex-wife’s (Morena Baccarin) former colleagues (Minnie Driver); Juliana Margulies plays one of his sisters, an author whose success has overshadowed her husband’s (Campbell Scott); and Gretchen Mol plays the other, a former singer-songwriter wrestling with a domineering, alcoholic partner (Patrick Wilson).
Burns insists that he seldom pulls too heavily from his own experiences for inspiration, but as much as it excited him to examine the larger, existential challenges of capital-A adulthood, he admits that some of the quandaries his characters faced hit closer to home than others. “I got excited that we haven’t had a movie about us as it relates to the ‘tininess’ of real life,” he remembers. “Do you have anything left to say?
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