Irish tale of love charms
Wild Mountain Thyme
(PG, 102 mins) Directed by John Patrick Shanley Reviewed by
Ididn’t know it, but it turns out there is a vast and very special soft spot in my heart for films in which people shout declarations of undying love at each other while getting absolutely drenched in rainstorms.
In what we quaintly refer to as ‘‘real life’’, you or I – no matter what the urgency of our ardour – would run for the nearest barn or bus stop to get out of that rain. And even then, we would be more concerned with getting a fire lit or calling an Uber (I’m writing this in Wellington. Our bus stops are only useful these days for calling Ubers), than with blurting out our longing for the sodden and possibly hypothermic wee moppet in our arms.
But, as Wild Mountain Thyme draws to its utterly ‘‘for God’s sake, man, get out of the rain, she’ll catch her death’’ conclusion, I instead found myself grinning like a chimp with a new banana and being quietly chuffed that everything had worked out as it should.
Not that there was any doubt. But John Patrick Shanley’s adaptation of his play,
Outside Mullingar, sure does take the long way round, to get to
where we all knew it was going.
Wild Mountain Thyme is a love story, of course. In a rural Irish village straight out of a tourism board video, youngish Anthony Reilly (Jamie Dornan) and Rosemary Muldoon (Emily Blunt) have been pawing the ground in front of each other for years.
With them both now in their 30s, obviously besotted, clear of skin and bright of eye when everyone around them appears to have been carved out of turnips – and no other eligible singles within a long day’s walk of their neighbouring farms – the obvious question is, ‘‘Why the hell haven’t these two got together already?’’
The answer, when it finally arrives, is so daft and completely unexpected that whatever misgivings I had about the sheer cliched nonsense of everything up
to that point simply dissolved, as I decided – against all commonsense – that I had actually enjoyed this folly, probably more than it really deserves.
With an interlude in New York City that seems to belong in a different film, a cameo from Jon Hamm (Mad Men) that makes absolutely no sense at all, even within these baggiest of parameters – and a tossed salad of accents that traverse the Emerald Isle, often within a single sentence, this is not a film short on laughs, even if not all of them are entirely intentional.
Christopher Walken – yes, he shows up, too – doesn’t even bother trying, bless him, settling instead for a vaguely lilting variant of his familiar New York vowels, deftly sidestepping all the diddly-dee pitfalls that Blunt and co are plummeting into.
I’d like to see Wild Mountain Thyme adapted as a Studio Ghibli animation, or on a bare theatre stage, where the audience could concoct scenery and backdrops in their mind’s eye; something suitably mad and loveable to accompany this great uprush of the sheerest blarney.
Theatre or animation could at least commit wholesale to the whimsy and near-magical realism that propels Wild Mountain Thyme through its most unlikely and likeable passages.
This is a film that only falters when it tries to be taken seriously.
Left to its own daft devices, the film is a wobbly, unexpected triumph of charm over credibility.