The Family McMullen

The Ghosts of Brooklyn Past

There’s a melancholy all its own in revisiting a neighborhood after a few decades away. The map looks familiar, but everything has been subtly polished into a stranger version of itself. The old dive now serves expensive IPAs with herbs floating in them. That was the feeling I had watching Edward Burns’s *The Family McMullen*, his thirty-years-later return to the little 1995 indie that announced him to the world. Back then he was a young guy shooting on 16mm over weekends with borrowed money and sheer nerve. Now he’s nearing sixty, and you can feel how much of the roughness has been smoothed out. Whether that reads as maturity or comfort is the real question hanging over the movie.



The story drops us into Barry’s life over Thanksgiving. Burns plays him as twice divorced and unexpectedly hosting his twenty-something children, played by Halston Sage and Pico Alexander, who have boomeranged back to Brooklyn. Patrick, still played by Michael McGlone, is muddling through a separation under the old familiar weight of Irish-Catholic guilt. Jack is gone now, and Connie Britton returns as his widow Molly. There’s something quietly startling about seeing Britton in this role again when the original was her screen debut, years before television turned her into such a familiar presence.

Diego Lerer of Micropsia Cine wrote that the film "works like a Woody Allen film transplanted to Irish-American, middle-class Brooklyn instead of Manhattan’s neurotic intellectuals," which feels basically right. Burns no longer chases the scrappy handheld texture of his early work. Everything is wider, sleeker, and more expensive-looking. The homes are so immaculate they barely seem inhabited. These spaces look arranged for a magazine shoot rather than lived in by people who toss their mail on the counter and forget about it.



What keeps that polish from flattening everything is the cast. Britton in particular knows exactly how to work against the clean surfaces around her. When Molly mentions Jack, her body tightens almost imperceptibly, as if she’s bracing against memory itself; a moment later, leaning against the kitchen counter with Barry, she loosens into an ease that feels years deep. McGlone does something similarly physical with Patrick, giving him a drooping, burdened gait that makes guilt seem like an actual weight he’s dragging from room to room.

Burns also still knows when to get out of the way. There’s a lovely mid-film scene where Barry and Molly sit in the kitchen casually dismantling Patty’s wedding plans. Nothing explodes. Nobody cries. They drink coffee, pause, circle back, and let familiarity fill the space between words. The camera mostly stays put. It’s a small reminder that beneath the polished surfaces, Burns still has an ear for how people sound when they’re not performing for anyone.



The film definitely stumbles. At times the script explains too much, repeating information we had already picked up, and some of the younger performances feel pitched to sitcom rather than low-key family drama. Sarah G. Vincent wasn’t being entirely unfair when she said the movie feels "as if Burns had gone through an uncanny valley filter in terms of story line and production." It can feel a little too arranged, too eager to resolve every strain before it fully settles in.

But maybe that softening is part of the point. In your twenties, every romantic and familial mess feels catastrophic. By your late fifties, a lot of it starts looking like weather. This sequel doesn’t have the hunger of the original film. What it has instead is a quiet fondness for people who keep disappointing one another and showing up anyway. As James Kenney wrote for Tremble...Sigh...Wonder, Burns is "less a brand than a reliable neighborhood deli: maybe you don’t cross town for it, but when you’re there you remember why you keep going back." That sounds right to me. I wouldn’t make a special trip either, but I was happy to spend some time there.