Review: Indie survivor Ed Burns returns with the bland ‘Millers in Marriage’

Thirty years after his breakout as a Sundance darling with “The Brothers McMullen,” Edward Burns may have faded from view as an indie troubadour of middle-class mores, family fractures and romantic entanglements. But the writer-director-star is still wholly committed to his East Coast brand of beige, affable, lightly weathered angst, in which nobody exhibits too much of any one disruptive emotion if it’ll make a viewer feel uncomfortable.

Discontent is a tricky subject if you’re trying to capture it but not turn people off, and Burns’ latest pretty-people-in-turmoil opus, “Millers in Marriage,” about three middle-aged siblings in different stages of relationship restlessness, reveals the result of that flattening approach. Mildness reigns and indifference blooms. What calls out to be well seasoned — a dish with bits that are scorched and raw — is instead merely a tepid porridge.

Burns can still sew up a talented cast, which likely speaks to the appeal of any project these days with a semblance of recognizable adult humanity bubbling inside. (The fall-colored rural New Jersey locations and well-appointed interiors are a draw as well.) Gretchen Mol plays soft-spoken musician Eve, a wife and mother whose simmering dissatisfaction stems from an indie-rock career that stalled decades ago when she began a family with her then-band’s manager, Scott (a very good Patrick Wilson), now an intemperate, dismissive drunk who, nonetheless, got to keep his career in music.

Julianna Margulies plays Eve’s sister Maggie, the more prolific and successful half of a two-novelist household with older husband Nick (Campbell Scott), whose writer’s block and mopey, jealous mood has begun to sap the joy from her success. Meanwhile, the women’s brother, Andy (a Kristofferson-haired Burns), a painter, is enjoying a new romantic life with kind, attentive, same-aged Renee (Minnie Driver) shortly after being dumped by his younger wife of 15 years, Tina (Morena Baccarin).

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For a band of freshly unmoored 50-somethings, these may be realistic feelings to dive into, but convenience is the only appropriate word for Burns’ scenarios. Everyone’s temptations, whether helpful or not, come into view at the same time. Eve is contacted for an interview by a music journalist acquaintance (Benjamin Bratt) whose adoring patter about the good old days, her talent and second chances pushes all those life-that-got-away buttons; Maggie considers rekindling an affair with an estate caretaker (Brian d‘Arcy James) who enjoys her work; and Andy is suddenly getting contacted again by the newly flirtatious Tina, who seems put out that her ex is dating a former colleague.

As dramatic tipping points go, any of these stories would be agreeably complicated on its own, but reduced to panels in a triptych, they come off as thin and overarticulated. Mol, Margulies and Burns are fine, but they barely seem connected to each other as characters with a shared history, save their requirements as mouthpieces of exposition. Any edge comes from their regular scene partners: Wilson’s believably unpleasant demeanor, Bratt’s vulnerable charm, Scott’s lo-fi depression and, most appealingly, Driver’s intelligent wariness.

Early on in Burns’ career, he was getting called an Irish Catholic Woody Allen — which felt a tad unearned because the movies weren’t as funny. But now, with three parallel decades of Allen’s increased creative laziness and Burns’ own comfortable mediocrity, the label fits more snugly. That isn’t to say Burns’ safely declarative dialogue and what-if storytelling won’t spur you to think of your own relationship and matters of fulfillment. But that just makes “Millers in Marriage” feel more like a study topic guide for discussion than a movie.