This romcom is so twee that I think my brain leaked out of my nose
Wild Mountain Thyme 12A cert, 104 min
Dir John Patrick Shanley
Starring Jamie Dornan, Emily Blunt, Christopher Walken, Jon Hamm, Lydia Mcguinness, Danielle Ryan
If you felt that this year’s Oscar titles were too weighty and severe for their own good, here’s the antidote: a film so frivolous and twee I felt as if my brain were leaking out of my nose as I watched. Expanded by John Patrick Shanley from his 2014 play Outside Mullingar, Wild Mountain Thyme is a romantic comedy about a man and a woman who grew up on neighbouring farms somewhere inside an advert for the Irish tourist board, in which the green of every hillside has been cranked up to a queasy hue.
Their names are Anthony (Jamie Dornan) and Rosemary (Emily Blunt), and they’re young, attractive and compatibly eccentric – a change from the play, in which the leads were unprepossessing fortysomethings who’d spent their adult lives on the shelf. Here, it’s hard to fathom why our pair aren’t already an item: they’ve obviously been yearning for each other for years, and the usual romcom obstacles – social differences, family objections – are conspicuous by their absence. (The best the film comes up with is a childhood squabble that anyone normal would have got over.)
Indeed, when Anthony finally explains what has been troubling him his whole life, it makes so little sense that you’re left wondering whether he’s talking figuratively – or, in a final-act twist, has turned out to be a lunatic. Perhaps this is something Anthony’s father (Christopher Walken) has picked up on, given he announces early on that he’s considering writing his son out of his will and selling the farm to his strapping American nephew (Jon Hamm) instead.
To say that Anthony and Rosemary behave like characters in a play might sound obvious, but there really is no trace of recognisable human behaviour here: just moping (him), stomping (her), and soliloquising in front of picture-book landscapes. The accents are, if anything, even less authentic. At least Walken plays his part as if he were in a skit: his opening narration is like a send-up of blarneyfied quirk. (“Welcome, welcome to Oireland,” he cheerfully begins. “Moi name’s Tony Reilly. Oi’m dead.”) But the film’s haphazard vowels are less understandable when it comes to Blunt, and they’re inexcusable with Dornan, who grew up in Belfast.
Shanley is capable of playful scripts that toy with national stereotypes: he wrote Moonstruck (1987), the Cher/ Nicolas Cage romcom set in Brooklyn’s raucous Italian-american enclave. But despite a handful of Moonstruck-like moments, Wild Mountain Thyme is deeply embarrassing stuff. And when that final twist lands – well,
would be more like it.