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Wild Mountain Thyme review: Ghastly poetry, ill-fitting wellies and perplexing Oirish accents from the land of the little people
Also reviewed: Black Bear and Laddie
Faith and begob: Jamie Dornan and Emily Blunt in Wild Mountain Thyme
Self-absorbed: Aubrey Plaza in Black Bear
Vision and instinct: Producer Alan Ladd Jr (right), receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame in 2007, with Mel Brooks. Photo: Getty
Re-fried Synge: Blunt and Dornan
Suave and brash: Jon Hamm as American cousin Adam
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Wild Mountain Thyme **
(Prime, Google, Sky Store etc, 102mins)
The shillelaghs were out for John Patrick Shanley’s Wild Mountain Thyme last December, when it was released in the US and fruity trailers drifted over here. Across rain-sodden western fields, two impossibly handsome bog-trotters (Jamie Dornan and Emily Blunt) roared at each other in strange and stilted accents.
What was this, the 1980s?, the Dublin commentariat wondered. Do we really still have to put up with this stage-Irish stuff?
Dismissed in absentia, condemned to death sight unseen, Shanley’s drama was consigned to the cúinne dána occupied by such skulking articles as Far and Away and Darby O’Gill.
Bit unjust though, no? Might be an idea to watch the damn thing before we cast it into the cultural wilderness? Well yes, in theory, but…
Things do not start promisingly. After a lush opening sequence that sweeps us over the Cliffs of Moher and into the western heartlands, we meet our narrator, wily farmer Tony Reilly. It’s Christopher Walken, hair standing furiously on end as though he’s just had a close encounter with an electric fence, who in accents indescribable now gives us the lay of the land.
His farm abuts that of the Muldoons, and a dispute over an adjoining field has led to angry stalemate. Young Rosemary Muldoon (Blunt) is a wild, poetic type, and has since childhood been hopelessly in love with Reilly’s son Anthony (Dornan).
Hopelessly but inexplicably, because Anthony is an eccentric, brooding fellow, a kind of gom Heathcliff who strides the hills in ill-fitting wellies, talking to trees and gesticulating wildly at the indifferent sky. “Do you still hear the voice in the fields?” Rosemary asks him. He’d want to get that seen to.
Nothing seems to make this man happy. “Do you not love the farm?” Rosemary innocently asks. “Sure I hate it like a prison,” he says. “I came up out of it like a tree and here I am with it around me.” If this sounds like re-fried Synge, Shanley is only getting started.
Anthony may not love the farm but he takes the hump big time when his dad (who has already announced his intention to die) unleashes plans to sell his land to an American cousin, Adam Kelly.
Enter Jon Hamm, suave and brash and grinning like a Cheshire cat, relieved no doubt that he won’t be obliged to have a go at the old faith-and-begobs himself.
Adam’s not a bad sort, and takes a shine to Rosemary, who might look like a drunk Laura Ashley catwalk model but is winsome and not entirely mad. Adam plans to whisk her off to America; Anthony would want to get his act together.
Shanley adapted his script from his own play, Outside Mullingar, and there is no doubting its sincerity. He clearly grew up listening to Irish voices, and when characters say things like “bad cess to you”, the inflexion rings true.
Most of the time, though, nobody says anything in an ordinary way. “He tore holes in the sky with that gun,” old man Reilly says of Rosemary’s late father, who was addicted to taking potshots at crows with his 12-gauge. There are snatches of this ghastly poetry throughout.
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Then there are the accents. “Your mother would die again if she saw the state of the house,” Walken’s Tony tells his son at one point. Like a Transylvanian he speaks, and he’s not alone.
Most perplexing of all is Dornan: a son of this island, he sounds every bit as egregiously Oirish as the rest of them. Why? My theory is that he, a natural gentleman, sympathetically aligned his ‘brogue’ with Blunt’s so as not to leave her hanging in the breeze, alone and ludicrous.
His efforts are in vain, for Blunt’s accent gambols skittishly across the counties before finally coming to rest in the land of the little people. It’s as though her voice coach advised her to abandon all diction and hope for the best.
The results are not edifying, and yet somehow, Blunt manages to salvage something approaching a believable character from the sea of verbiage she’s been presented with. Her Rosemary might be as mad as a cat in a thunderstorm, but she does at least have goals, an agenda.
Dornan is hopelessly miscast as Anthony, a mud-soaked malcontent with little to recommend him on the romantic front. Even Rosemary, who’s supposed to be in love with the chap, cannot hide her boredom, and gets all giddy whenever she’s left alone with Adam. She could do worse.
We accept that Irish-Americans nurse hopelessly romantic notions about the old sod, but in this day and age it is simply not good enough to assume that we are all repressed but impassioned idiot savants. We’re so much craftier, and less interesting, than that.
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Black Bear ****
(ifi@home, Prime, Sky etc, 104mins)
Tricky, surreal and rather in love with itself, Lawrence Michael Levine’s Black Bear could be accused of navel-gazing were it not such wicked fun.
It charts the perils of marriage and film-making, and stars a wonderfully self-absorbed Aubrey Plaza as Allison, an actress and director who arrives at an idyllic lakeside retreat to write a screenplay.
The rambling wooden house is run by Gabe (Christopher Abbott), a musician, and his wife Blair (Sarah Gadon), who’s pregnant. They were Brooklyn hipsters but retreated to this house Gabe inherited, and neither seem thrilled about it.
In scenes reminiscent of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Blair and Gabe bicker over the course of a drunken evening, while Allison, who’s clearly no peacemaker, watches purring from the sidelines.
The story and characters then shift and change as the house becomes the set for a film whose director pretends he’s having an affair in order to provoke an anguished performance from its star, his wife.
While perhaps ultimately a little too clever for its own good, Black Bear is very funny at times, and Plaza and Gadon are excellent.
Laddie ****
(YouTube, iTunes, Sky Store etc, 83mins)
Hollywood producers are famed for their cut-throat amorality, but Alan Ladd Jr was the exception that proves the rule.
The unwanted son of 1940s matinee idol Alan Ladd, ‘Laddie’, as he is affectionately known, tried his hand at directing before becoming first a talent agent, then a producer.
In the mid-1970s he joined Fox, where he had a major impact. It was he who backed George Lucas’s wild plans for a space opera, and fought tooth and nail to get Star Wars made.
Vision and instinct: Producer Alan Ladd Jr (right), receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame in 2007, with Mel Brooks. Photo: Getty
Ladd resurrected Akira Kurosawa’s career, saved All That Jazz from the scrapheap, nurtured female directors and producers, and gave Ron Howard, Mel Gibson and Ben Affleck their directing starts.
In Laddie, everyone from Mel Brooks and Morgan Freeman to Lucas, Gibson, Richard Donner and Sigourney Weaver line up to sing the great man’s praises.
There are countless examples of his loyalty, vision and artistic instinct, and Laddie himself recalls saying to Alien director Ridley Scott, “why don’t we make Ripley a woman?”.
This documentary, made by his daughter Amanda Ladd Jones, is genuinely heartwarming.
Irish Independent
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