No Looking Back

Originally titled Long Time, Nothing New, Edward Burns's new film might as well have been called Long Time, Nothing Happens. In an attempt to move beyond the Irish-American dysfunctional families of The Brothers McMullen and She's the One, he's relocated to the ethnically generic New Jersey shore of Bruce Springsteen songs (ludicrously over-represented on the soundtrack). The result looks moody and convincing, with its triple-deckers weatherbeaten both inside and outside, all its streets empty but for the characters' beat-up Detroit gas guzzlers, and all of them cul-de-sacs. It's a place where it rains every day, and the characters and their stories are as vacant and dead-ended as their hometown.

Like Claudia (a drab Lauren Holly), who toils in a diner in a greasy spoon and heads home to carry the empty trash cans from the sidewalk to the backyard and to face yet again her unfulfilling relationship with Michael (Jon Bon Jovi, showing some range), who wants to marry her so they can go nowhere securely together. This is the kind of movie where the dramatic turning point arrives when someone refuses to carry a trash can to the backyard, and Claudia gets her chance when her raffish ex-love Charlie (Burns striving for charmlessness and attaining it) returns and resumes hitting on her. Burns strains for a feminist resolution at the cost of his sardonic humor; this is one case where looking back might have been a good idea. At the Nickelodeon and the Copley Place and in the suburbs.

-- Peter Keough