Rich people have problems too, is one takeaway from “Millers in Marriage,” the 14th feature from the writer and director Edward Burns. A roundelay of discontent, disappointment and disappearing dreams, this smoothly executed, coolly controlled relationship drama observes three siblings on the wrong side of 50 and, clearly, the right side of the property market.
All are artists of one sort or another, and all reside in homes that appear ripped from the pages of Architectural Digest. Andy (Burns), a glumly separated painter, is torn between his attraction to a straight-shooting, happily divorced Englishwoman (a perfect Minnie Driver) and the renewed attentions of his volatile wife (Morena Baccarin). His sister Maggie (Julianna Margulies) is a novelist whose facility at churning out high-society beach reads isn’t helping her husband (a dour Campbell Scott) dislodge his writer’s block. The third sibling, Eve (a warm and engaging Gretchen Mol), a onetime rock musician, is deeply regretting the abandonment of her career to have babies with her former manager (Patrick Wilson), now a perpetually sozzled grouch.
Who better, then, to pry Eve loose than a rangy, rakish music journalist (Benjamin Bratt) whose game includes unironic hat-wearing and — like a dispiriting number of men in his age bracket — the unembarrassed deployment of Stephen Stills lyrics?
Cutting elegantly back and forth among the siblings, “Millers in Marriage” is a sincere, sometimes trite attempt to address midlife drift and late-marriage frustrations, its empty nests gaping beneath gleaming countertops and gauzy photography. Its characters may be stressed out, but its rhythms are leisurely, the skill of the actors mostly countering the weaknesses in the script. For Burns, though, the difficulty may be getting audiences to invest in the unhappiness of people who wake up each morning in square footage like this.
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