On 11 November 2020, the National Leprechaun Museum, the keepers of the flame of whimsical Irish mythology and gentle storytelling, tweeted after watching the trailer for Wild Mountain Thyme: “Even we think this is a bit much.” They’re not wrong. John Patrick Shanley’s woefully misjudged romantic drama, based on his play Outside Mullingar, is more Irish than Bono drawing a four-leaf clover into a pint of Guinness, so full of rural quirk, magical enchantment and oversaturated tweeness it makes The Quiet Man look like Hunger. The cast, especially Emily Blunt and Jon Hamm, do their best to breathe real life into the fanciful proceedings, but it is let down by easy stereotypes, a botched tone, a distant relationship to authenticity and one truly brain-melting storytelling decision.
It’s a workable if familiar love-triangle idea but Shanley imbues little charm into the proceedings
The internet-hammered Irish accents are the least of Wild Mountain Thyme’s problems. Shanley, whose Oscar-winning screenplay for Moonstruck is a classic of the romcomdram genre, sets the story up as a shaggy-dog story narrated from beyond the grave by Tony Reilly (Christopher Walken, scoring 2/10 on the Eamonn Holmes Convincing Irish Accent scale). He tells the story of the seemingly doomed relationship between his tentative son Anthony (Jamie Dornan, 10/10) and the passionate Rosemary Muldoon (Blunt, 6/10), who has held a flaming torch for Anthony for so long that not even Fireman Sam could put it out. Because of Anthony’s diffidence, Tony decides not to bequeath the farm to his son. Enter Anthony’s American cousin Adam (Hamm, his own accent) who turns up in a Rolls-Royce, dreams of owning a farm and becomes immediately interested in Rosemary.
It’s a workable if familiar love-triangle idea but Shanley imbues little charm into the proceedings, flitting between overwritten dialogue exchanges, tired Irish tropes (plaintive sing-songs), paper-thin caricatures (Barry McGovern’s Bad News Cleary so called because he always delivers bad news), and a broad strain of humour involving Dornan performing pratfalls and proposing to a donkey that blows up into a rumour around town. But the film’s biggest fault lies in the fact that for most of the running time, it is never truly explained what is stopping Anthony and Rosemary from being together. And when Shanley finally decides to reveal his hand as to why Anthony is so emotionally broken, it immediately enters the Batshit-Craziest Story Choices Ever Put On Film Hall Of Fame.
Some of Shanley’s writing — there’s a strong father-and-son scene between Tony and Anthony; Rosemary has a touching observation about death — hints at what might have been. Blunt lends a semblance of conviction to the Swan Lake-obsessed, pipe-smoking Rosemary, Dornan spends most of the movie looking befuddled, and Hamm gives good New-Yorker-in-a-backwoodsy-bog vibes, his character offering a genuine threat to the happy outcome. But the filmmaking, from cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt’s greener-than-the-Hulk-imagery to Amelia Warner’s fiddle-tastic score, creates a world where little feels real, even on the film’s own flimsy terms. The end result is a bigger Irish cartoon than WolfWalkers.
