Six reasons ‘Irish Wish’ won’t ring true if you know the real Ireland
Just in time for St Patrick’s Day, the latest addition to the Irish-film-made-for-everyoneelse-not-in-Ireland canon arrives on Netflix. Joining a glittering roll-call that already includes Leap Year, Wild Mountain Thyme and PS I Love You, Irish Wish
also heralds Lindsay Lohan’s muchvaunted comeback. Above all else, it shows Ireland off in all its twinkly, emerald-green splendour.
So is the film bogged down with begorrahs and chock-full of Paddywhackery? Well, Ireland certainly looks spiffy, sepia-tinted and squeaky clean. It’s also a version of Ireland some might say is a smidge removed from reality.
Let’s count the many ways in which Irish Wish Ireland simply doesn’t ring true to those of us not flying in to Knock for a fancy wedding.
1. Are Irish writers always this debonair?
Paul Kennedy (Alexander Vlahos) is the type of guy whose Grecian curls fall just so, and who often wears a pocket square with his impeccable tailoring (even around the house). Paul is the type of guy who organises a picnic-cum-boat-trip and then packs not just Heineken and Taytos, but a proper basket full of French bread and Champagne.
Paul is also, somehow, the “UK’s best-selling author”, despite having the empathy and self-awareness of a spoon and writing books with twinkly covers and titles like Two Irish Hearts.
Paul has also decided that a spot of preventative Botox might be no bad thing after all. Behan, he ain’t.
2. The Leap Year-style tour around Ireland
I suspect this might be the nefarious doing of west-of-Ireland taxi companies in cahoots, but films such as these have no problem peddling the idea it’s really, really hard to get around Ireland. At one point, our luckless heroine Maddie (Lohan) and her wedding photographer James (Ed Speleers) encounter a tree on the road after a storm.
“It’s the only road out of here,” James says solemnly, while every Irish person knows full well there’s always a boreen or byway that will get you to where you need to go if you look hard enough. No harm, the pair are now forced to take rooms in a nearby pub.
And in a wonderful coincidence, the nearest pub to this fallen branch happens to have a rake of flat-capped Riverdancers already in situ.
There will be no “Mad Jimmy the salmon poacher who got done for the drink-driving a few years back” locals in this back-of-beyond joint, no siree! Everyone here is ready for their close-up, or Abercrombie & Fitch ad campaign.
Earlier in the film, Maddie and
James take a lovely retro bus (thanks to Brigid’s Signature Tours, which becomes significant later) from Knock to the Kennedys’ palatial mansion, which appears to be in Westport. Eagled-eyed viewers/pedants like me might notice the diversion to… Cobh.
Also, the lovely retro bus drops Maddie straight to the gate of the Kennedy home.
“I can take you right there, love,” he says, without doing that eye-rolling, sharp exhalation thing you might otherwise expect. That’s right, suspend your disbelief.
3. Saint Brigid grants wishes
Now that she has her own public holiday, we’ve been learning a lot about Saint Brigid. She founded a convent in Kildare, is the patron saint of midwives and chicken farmers and once transformed dirty bathwater into clean beer.
Irish Wish’s Saint Brigid is almost as useful as that. Where it was implied in Irish Wish’s trailer that the Irish breeze granted wishes to lovelorn American tourists, Maddie’s betrothal to Paul Kennedy is, in fact, the doing of a wish-granting Saint Brigid.
Here, she is a mischief-making, twinkly sort (played by Dawn Bradfield) who shows up in a headscarf and natty dress and spends half her day making cheeky, knowing winks. The way you do.
4. The Big House
Clearly, the makers of Irish Wish have never heard about the cost of gas and electricity in Ireland. Far from living in one or two rooms of their clearly BER-exempt pile, as many Big House owners might do these days, the Kennedys live extravagantly and don’t appear to have any kind of money-making sideline like an on-site cafe or paying visitors.
The Kennedys also have a butler in white gloves who serves up (wait for it) boxty and caviar for breakfast. We aren’t even in a Guilbaud restaurant.
5. Irish Tinder
Maddie’s friend Heather (Ayesha Curry), like any self-respecting singleton on a foreign trip, has got stuck into the dating apps before she has so much as unpacked a suitcase.
“There are some seriously hot men in this town,” she enthuses as her screen positively lights up with a plethora of local Mayo hotties. There isn’t a drugged tiger, a picture taken at the rugby or a duff selfie anywhere in sight. That, reader, is the sound of several thousand Irish single women rolling their eyes.
6. The Cliffs of Moher
Maddie and James enjoy a moment of quiet reflection and deep, meaningful conversation while at the very edge of the Cliffs of Moher. This despite a) never being rained on or blown out of it, and b) Lindsay Lohan’s hair staying pretty well-behaved.
“I think I’ve just stepped into a James Joyce novel,” Maddie says as she gazes out at the Atlantic. Best if we don’t ask which one.
The questionable geography is the least of it: suspend all disbelief now
‘Every Irish person knows full well there’s always a boreen or byway that’ll get you where you need to go’