Recently, while browsing the few movie channels I still have (as part of my cable package, a package I kept because it included Netflix. So I pay more for cable so I can get Netflix free. Wait... ), I came across The Brothers McMullen, a movie that I had some fond memories of because when it came to the video store I was working in back in 1995, it was all the rage. Usually because all the copies of Apollo 13 were rented out.
I kid. Since it was a Mom-and-Pop video store and not a Blockbuster or Hollywood Video, the owner used to tell his employees that the only way to survive was not to compete with the big chains, but offer things that the big stores maybe didn’t have. Tops on that list was customer service, and second was independent movies that maybe went beneath their notice. Well, ok. If I’m being honest, the best thing we could offer that Blockbuster couldn’t was porn. Customer service and indie movies were a distant second and third.
The beauty of that theory was that it was during what I would call the Golden Age of Independent Filmmaking. Maybe I only think that because I was in college studying to get a degree in film, and I saw myself as one of those filmmakers, literally assuming that one day, a movie I made would be on the shelves of that store. But it was also a moment in time; a time when a gritty film made with pocket change could actually gain an audience, with some luck and a little bit of that pocket change set aside for marketing. If you were one of those auteur filmmakers, your movie was maybe screened in small art houses, and if it generated enough buzz there, then it went to the video market and people read about it in a magazine or saw it on Siskel and Ebert and rented it. Or if they hadn’t read about it, they asked the clerk at their Mom-and-Pop video store what was good, and if it was a film geek like me behind that counter, they would have said, “Have you seen Brothers McMullen?” I sometimes thought if I recommended my favorite movies enough, I could somehow increase the gross. I knew it was foolish, but it was a fun way to pass the time back then. Incidentally, I had a co-worker who didn’t give a crap about indie films and only watched action movies, and if customers asked him about an indie darling, he would always say, in a cadence similar to the Sadness character in Inside Out, “I haven’t seen it but I heard it’s good.”
That is all kind of an oversimplification of the business of independent film, but essentially that’s how it worked back then. This is pre-streaming, pre-social media, basically pre-internet. I mean, you might have gotten one of those AOL cd’s in the mail, but it certainly wasn’t very widespread. So as I watched this low-quality indie film on my flatscreen TV (and I don’t mean “low-quality” because it isn’t a good film. I literally mean the quality of the film is low.), I was transported back to a time when I was interested in that stuff. Not necessarily in the story of Finbar McMullen and his wayward brothers, but in the story of The Brothers McMullen.
Edward Burns’ little film-that-could (and did) was shot mostly in his mother’s house on weekends over an eight-month period from the Fall of 1993 to the Spring of 1994. His Dad, Edward Sr., put up $10,000 to get him started, and eight of the ten cast members, including Edward and his then-girlfriend, Maxine Bahns, were making their film debuts. The final budget ended up being somewhere around $30,000 for the actual movie-making, and a boatload more for getting the word out once there was some buzz, but it ended up being the highest grossing film by percentage of 1995, eventually grossing over $13 million. The reason it became successful at all is that supposedly Burns saw Robert Redford in an elevator and shoved a tape of the film in his hands and begged him to watch it. Redford thought he looked like a homeless man, but apparently said, “I get that all the time, but I thought, what the hell, that's what it's all about." Redford enjoyed it enough to get Burns to Sundance, where it won Best Picture of 1995. Burns went on to direct and act in many more of his own films, and is currently working on Bridge and Tunnel. Not bad for a homeless guy.
But here’s the funny thing about watching a low-budget 90’s movie in 2021, and it has nothing to do with the grainy look of the film, because honestly, I kind of like that. The thing that really struck me is the actual story going on, which is to say, there really isn’t one. The official tagline is, “Jack is trying to save his marriage, Patrick is in a hopeless relationship, but their biggest problem is Barry's brotherly advice.” Barry is the character played by Burns himself, and believe it or not, he is a young artist on the brink of success. I must admit, I don’t actually know if he is a filmmaker, or a writer, or what, and I don’t remember if the film even tells us, but he has an agent who is pestering him for more work, so they establish that he has that pressure on him. He apparently doesn’t have enough money to live on his own yet, however, because he moves in with his brother, Jack, who now owns the house that they grew up in. Also living there is their younger brother Patrick who lives there because… reasons. Barry is looking for an apartment, but gets one stolen from him by Audrey, played by Bahns, and they eventually become romantically entwined, which is the other pressure that Barry finds weighing on him.
Meanwhile, Jack the Elder is facing pressure from his wife to start a family, and from a younger, sexier girl who just wants to have a little fun with him in the bedroom. He eventually succumbs to her charms and begins having an affair, although it is established in an awkward voiceover that he kind of regrets it. Young Patrick is also feeling the pressure because he is dating a Jewish girl, which I guess matters because he’s a devout Catholic, who he wants to break up with, and then he is distraught when she dumps him. There was also a pregnancy storyline with Patrick and her, which caused more angst because she wanted to get an abortion and Patrick, being Catholic, had no time for that. This is all happening five years after their father has passed away and their mother has decided that now that she is free, she’s moving back to Ireland to be with her former lover. Before she goes, she urges them all not to waste their lives with the wrong person. I don’t know why it was established that it took five years for all of this to come to a boil all at once, but they are all in a kerfuffle, so I guess that’s all that matters.
What I imagine the tagline meant was that all this stuff is happening, and because these brothers have all known each other for their entire lives, they feel they can be brutally honest with each other about their feelings. This leads to several scenes filled with that wonderful “Seinfeld-ian” dialogue that was a staple of so many indie films of the time, where characters talk “the way people talk,” even though that was not actually true. I won’t waste a lot of time over-analyzing what Seinfeld was really all about but you may recall the classic line that it was “a show about nothing,” even though that's not at all what it was about. In fact, the original pitch was a show about how a comedian comes up with their material, essentially making the show about everything.
This is where The Brothers McMullen and most indie films of the era (and yes, my own scripts) went off the tracks, and why they don’t always hold up so well. For one, Seinfeld was a half-hour sitcom, so they only had to fill about 22 minutes with conversations about the ugliest world leader, or how to recite a line in a Woody Allen movie. When you are filling 90 minutes of screen time with scenes like the one where Barry is telling his brother how a man is like a banana, and women like to come along and peel away the strong outer shell, it tends to get a little old (We get it! Barry doesn’t want to be tied down!).
It also should be noted that Seinfeld and Larry David learned what worked and established their comic timing after years on the stand-up circuit. They didn’t just sit down at a word processor and bang out a script and then ask their girlfriends to be in it. Imagine how lame that would have been.
The other major difference besides length was that there was an earnest-ness in those 90’s indie films that doesn’t really age well. While Jerry and his pals were practically winking at the camera, saying, “We can’t believe this is on TV, either,” there was almost a conceit with Burns and his contemporaries that seemingly had them looking at the audience and saying, “See how impassioned and deep we are.” I guess if you’re going to go through all the time and effort of making your own movie, you better believe in it. But why would anyone else believe in it? Obviously, I wasn’t in Edward Burns’ head when he was writing this script. Maybe he thought he was being a comic genius, and I’m sure he never intended that someone like me would be over-analyzing his film almost three decades later, but I bet he hoped that someone would. I doubt he spent every weekend for months and every dime he had so he would have an excuse to hang out with his girlfriend and his buddies. He obviously felt he had something to say and wanted people to hear it and be entertained by it. But in the end, what did he really have to say? What is the message behind all that earnest dialogue, other than Catholic guilt sucks?
When you dig a little deeper, there is an interesting message about morality, and making choices. As Roger Ebert pointed out in his review back in 1995, it was rare for a movie about three guys back then to not be about sex, but the ramifications of it. The affair that Jack has isn’t about sex, but about the fact that he wasn’t ready to start a family with his wife. Barry is afraid to commit to Audrey not because he doesn’t love her, but because his mother’s advice (and his parents’ loveless marriage in general), is ringing in his ears. And Patrick, well, he’s just a mess.
That’s a very lovely story that would make a fine submission to an online creative writing class, but unfortunately, it’s not exactly breaking any new ground in the movie world. I’m glad that Ed Burns forged his own path and is still working in show business all these years later, because in the mid-90’s, I personally knew ten people like him who are most likely working 9-5 in an office right now (Myself included). But the reason Edward Burns had to make this movie with his own money was probably because no studio would have greenlit this script, unless it was going to star Adam Sandler, Kevin James and David Spade as the brothers. And of course there are thousands of very good movies that were made by filmmakers that no studio would have paid a dime for, and the world needs those. But in this case, without the story of The Brothers McMullen, would I be excited by the story in The Brothers McMullen? Probably not. But if Apollo 13 was all rented out, I guess it could kill a night.
There will be more of these to come, unless I just get so much hate from it. meanwhile, check out my linktr.ee for more of my nonsense and drop me a line if you have any thoughts or suggestions on 90’s indie movies you would like to see covered.