Irish rom-com ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’ packs plenty of blarney
How can a man born in Ireland have a phony Irish accent? That is a question for Belfast-born Jamie Dornan, a talented actor best known for those awful “Fifty Shades of Grey” movies. The UK newspaper The Guardian accuses the Ireland-set romantic “dra-medy” “Wild Mountain Thyme” of “storms of paddywhackery” and “dodgy accents.”
In addition to Dornan’s Anthony Reilly, the same is true, the newspaper has said, for American Christopher Walken, playing Dornan’s ailing dad, Tony Reilly, and London-born Emily Blunt, who plays Rosemary Muldoon, Anthony’s besotted fellow farmer neighbor. One can assume that lovely Irish TV, stage and film actress Dearbhla Molloy is authentic enough as Rosemary’s sick mother, Aoife Muldoon.
“Wild Mountain Thyme” is John Ford’s “The Quiet Man” re-imagined as an even more cliched and sentimental Gaelic rom-com. Written and directed by Bronx-born playwright John Patrick Shanley of “Moonstruck” and “Doubt” fame and based on his play, the film is pure Irish kitsch. Rosemary and Anthony grew up together on adjoining farms, one strip of which, in a plot twist I never really grasped, was sold to the other owner, making it necessary for the owners to install dual entry gates.
The film is narrated by Tony Reilly, who jauntily informs us that he is dead. Also dead is Rosemary’s “da,” who wielded a shotgun and was “at war with the crows.” The grownup Rosemary is still in love with Anthony, who is also single and available. Rosemary has a big, black stallion (metaphor alert), who repeatedly escapes from his stall to run wild in the countryside, where he frequently visits a leafless tree on a hill blown into a permanently bent ideogram by the winds from the sea. Since childhood, Rosemary has been obsessed with Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake,” which we hear several times. She believes she is the white swan and frequently wears a long white, swan-costumelike dress.
Walken’s Tony, meanwhile, has more tics than a sick hound dog. For reasons that do not make a lot of sense, Tony is considering leaving the Reilly farm to Anthony’s American cousin Adam Kelly (Jon Hamm, playing a modern-day Don Draper), a money manager, instead of his own farmer son. This creates a completely phony competition between Adam and Anthony for Rosemary, a beautiful, well-heeled woman with no apparent previous suitors.
When Anthony’s ma, who was known to sing “Wild Mountain Thyme,” a song that has been recorded by the Corries, Ed Sheeran and Joan Baez, died, Anthony says he “couldn’t see colors.” I did not have this problem, watching “Wild Mountain Thyme,” which glows a radioactive shade of green. Blunt and Dornan have chemistry. But the words they speak are such off-putting nonsense (“I am a honeybee”?), you’d hardly notice. All that’s missing from the film is a combative leprechaun. If you want to learn something about Ireland, see “Crock of Gold.”