Wild Mountain Thyme film review: Daft rustic blarney not as wonderfully awful as trailer

Jamie Dornan and Emily Blunt in John Patrick Shanley's Wild Mountain Thyme. Photo: Kerry Brown/Bleecker Street

Hilary White

May 02 2021 02:30 AM

Wild Mountain Thyme

(Two Stars)

Cert 12, on demand

Strange race, the Irish. We’re very good at playing the poor mouth, licking our wounds on the international stage and carrying on like we’re the only people history ever happened to. Watch our hackles raise when our home-grown talent gets mistaken as British, or if those from overseas ridicule what we feel is ours and no one else’s to ridicule.

And yes, as the makers of Wild Mountain Thyme (or Far and Away, Leap Year, or any number of Hollywood outings depicting Ireland and the Irish, for that matter) discovered, woe betide any actor who can’t perfectly nail the accent.

When the trailer for this almost knowingly daft pastoral romance dropped last November, the nation as one reared up and took umbrage.

In Emily Blunt, Christopher Walken, and even Ulsterman Jamie Dornan, the stars were seen to slur and gnash their way through abysmal renditions of the stage-Oirish brogue.

This botched series of accents was enough to write off writer-director John Patrick Shanley’s film as a scandalous folly in the minds of people months out from any mooted release date.

Since then, Wild Mountain Thyme has become this ubiquitous cultural punchline in a world with time on its hands, something that it was hoped would turn out to be as wonderfully awful as the trailer teased.

Well, it seems that we were right about the folly part, at least. The temptation when reviewing something like Wild Mountain Thyme is to look past the shoddy accents and the theme-park depiction of a country of real people and very real problems.

Yes, Walken sounds like a Bostonian via Bollywood, but does it tell its story and is that story worth hanging around for 100-odd (at times, very odd, in fact) minutes of your life? It turns out that accents are almost negligible when it comes to this film’s problems.

Walken is Tony Reilly, who lives with bachelor son Anthony (Dornan). The land they own borders that of the Muldoons, a neighbouring family who have just buried their patriarch.

Ever since childhood, daughter Rosemary Muldoon (Blunt) has pined for Anthony, and now as adults facing questions about inheritance and land rights, the two exist in a state of quiet desperation for a move that neither is willing to make (one of the few accurate national characteristics Shanley has incorporated).

Adding a shard of urgency to the setting is the arrival from New York of gleaming nephew Adam, (Jon Hamm), the trope-rich American with an eye on Tony’s farm as well as a contested strip of land owned by Rosemary’s side.

Each catches the other’s eye, and with Anthony seemingly refusing to man-up, Rosemary accepts an invitation to New York. She seems to do this to test if her heart has misled her about Anthony, the gruff and tactless farmer’s son who is the polar opposite of smooth, cosmopolitan Adam.

I’m perhaps doing you a disservice in making Wild Mountain Thyme sound like something rather straightforward, logical and linear when it is anything but.

To look at, the film sweeps across the beautiful Mayo landscape in the shadow of Croagh Patrick, being sure to take in rivers and galloping thoroughbreds.

The cast is equally handsome and you could imagine a certain brand of unfussy Irish-American descendant finding some charmingly hapless diversion in its heavy-handed and nostalgia-soaked approach to the Old Sod.

But then, flying at you like lobbed cats comes a bombardment of weird, misfiring Blarney that makes you hope that Shanley – a New Yorker of Irish stock – merely lost control at some point during production and decided, ‘well, it all looks pretty enough so let’s run with it’.

Adapted from his own Broadway stage play, Outside Mullingar, the main purpose in everything that happens is to remind us that we are in a strange land where everyone speaks in archaic lyrical lilts – “And he, a heathen man!” “Will ye be takin’ the stout?” “Ah don’t go out, sure it’s black as tar.” – and technologically is 30 years behind (not a mobile phone in sight, and yet pizza delivery exists). People storm across fields in the name of love, fall over walls, and take an excruciating amount of time to spit things out.

In one slightly creepy scene, Rosemary tries to get Anthony drunk so she can take advantage of him, but sure it’s Ireland and sure what’s wrong with a drink and begorrah. A jumpy, skittish tempo sets in, making you wonder if a last-minute chop took place once the producers saw what they had on their hands.

But for all these things, perhaps the biggest issue is that it is not bad enough. Shanley’s film, with its lush backdrops and committed, if misguided, cast, doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo that this was to be a delectably hopeless diversion that came good on the promise of its shocking trailer.

It can’t even boast that, sadly.