‘The Family McMullen’ Review: Edward Burns Revisits His Irish-American Clan (HBO Max)

Thirty years ago, at the height of the indie-film boom and the Sundance frenzy, Edward Burns emerged as a Brooklyn-born actor/director of Irish descent who suddenly became a name to watch thanks to his $25,000 debut feature, The Brothers McMullen. For a while he was one of the faces of American independent cinema. Over the next several years Burns kept releasing films with reasonable visibility and moderate success (She’s the One, with Jennifer Aniston and Cameron Diaz; Sidewalks of New York; Ash Wednesday). But before long his star began to fade. He kept directing —and acting in— most of his projects, yet his releases arrived quietly, almost invisibly. It’s surprising to realize he’s made half a dozen features in the last fifteen years and that almost no one can name them.

Nothing dramatic happened to his career. Like many filmmakers, fashions shifted, styles changed, and the absence of a strong auteur signature may have pushed him off to the margins while contemporaries like Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Wes Anderson, and Richard Linklater —the one he most resembles— became fully canonized. Beyond the naturalism and breezy performances in his casts, the family-and-neighborhood themes (a lot of his films unfold in Brooklyn), the Irish-Catholic roots of many characters, and the romantic storylines he gravitates toward, Burns’s cinema hasn’t left many stylistic fingerprints. In fact, he can be read as a bridge to the later mumblecore movement, which explored similar worlds but in a far more radically independent register. In that sense, Burns ended up being too mainstream for the indies —and too indie for the mainstream.

The Family McMullen, his fifteenth feature, isn’t going to change that. But now that it’s landed on HBO Max, it does give him broader reach. It’s a sequel to his debut, set thirty years later, mixing returning characters with a new generation playing their grown children. It’s still a story about siblings, centered on Barry (played by Burns), twice divorced and now welcoming his two adult kids back home to Brooklyn for Thanksgiving. Joining them are his brother Pat (Michael McGlone) and sister-in-law Molly (Connie Britton, the one cast member who became a genuine star), now widowed after the death of Jack, the third McMullen brother. Early on, the film tries to slip in who’s who and what happened during the intervening three decades.

Barry is still single, half-irresponsible and half-cynical. Pat —more buttoned-up and religious— is separating from his wife and asks to crash at Barry’s place for a while. Molly never managed, or perhaps never tried, to start a new relationship; past infidelities and illness left her bruised. The big news is that Patty (Halston Sage), Barry’s daughter, is coming to dinner with her fiancé, Terrence Joseph (Bryan Fitzgerald), whom she plans to marry soon. Barry and Molly, for different reasons, don’t love the idea, but Pat insists they should be supportive. Also returning is Tommy (Pico Alexander), who unlike his sister has no plans whatsoever —romantic or otherwise. While Patty is the “perfect one,” Tommy is basically his father’s clone: a sarcastic comment for every situation and zero interest in commitment.

Shot in a format that feels —likely for budget reasons— quite theatrical, with long dialogue scenes inside Brooklyn homes, The Family McMullen follows the fallout after Barry and Molly cast doubt on Patty’s wedding plans, nudging the couple to “take some time” to see other people. Patty ends up staying with her father, and then Tommy announces he’s quit his job and will also be moving back in. That sets the stage for a full McMullen household and a chain of lightly romantic entanglements: Tommy with a woman he meets at a bar (Juliana Canfield), Patty with a plumber (Sam Vartholomeos), Molly with an old neighborhood friend (Brian d’Arcy James), Pat with a woman he lost touch with years ago (Shari Albert). Barry rounds out the roster when he unexpectedly runs into an ex (Tracee Ellis Ross), now connected to his life in an unforeseen way.

A gentle romantic comedy built around likable characters sketched in broad strokes —the irresponsible one, the religious one, the serious one, the “advice-giving aunt,” and so on— The Family McMullen avoids anything truly heavy, save for a brief moment of reflection in a sugar-coated finale that gradually reveals the film’s holiday-movie nature. In a sense, it works like a Woody Allen film transplanted to Irish-American, middle-class Brooklyn instead of Manhattan’s neurotic intellectuals. Burns isn’t aiming for more than that: revisiting a cluster of more-or-less charming characters, introducing a few new ones, and sharing where life has taken them. In between, a half-dozen light romantic subplots give everyone a chance to reassess their futures —or at least their love lives.

Burns still believes that Brooklyn, despite the seismic changes of the past thirty years, remains the sort of place where you bump into old friends on the street, at the pub, or in a doctor’s waiting room. The Catholic-Irish connection is still present —secondary but useful for understanding certain characters— and so is a family ethos that tries to hold steady through divorces, deaths, infidelities, separations, and arguments. The McMullens may be wildly different, and may bicker constantly (Barry with Pat, Tommy with Patty), but nothing seems able to break their bond. And even if Burns avoids deeper emotional territory —sometimes missing clear opportunities for it— The Family McMullen ultimately plays as a warm, pleasant celebration of neighborhood spirit and family ties.