Butler's Cinema Scene

Jamie Dornan, Emily Blunt

“WILD MOUNTAIN THYME” My rating: B-

101 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

I was prepared to dislike “Wild Mountain Thyme” as a collection of hoary old cliches about the Irish. Indeed, the movie is crammed with said cliches.

But about halfway through John Patrick Shanley’s film something  kicked in and my irritation  gave way to a luxurious wallow in romantic sentimentality.

I am ashamed of myself, dear reader, but there you have it.

Shanley, whose career high point remains the Oscar-winning screenplay to 1987’s “Moonstruck” (though one should not dismiss his work a writer/director of 2008’s “Doubt”), attempts here to give us his own “Quiet Man.”

“Wild Mountain Thyme” is a romance crammed with eccentric characters, lots of eye-calming greenery, lilting folk music (especially the haunting title tune), a dispute over farmland and two protagonists who, despite living in the  21st century, appear to have retained their virginity into their mid-30s.

Over aerial views of coastal Ireland a narrator (Christopher Walken) introduces himself as one Tony Reilly, adding “I’m dead.”

Well, death has never stopped an Irishman from talking. From the hereafter the late Tony relates the tale of his son, Anthony (Jamie Dornan), and the girl on the next farm over, Rosemary (Emily Blunt).

Flash back a year. Tony (still alive at this point) is more or less retired. Anthony has been running their farm…badly. He’s a sweet guy but painfully shy and majorly unfocused. How else can you explain living in close proximity to the astounding Rosemary without once picking up a sexual vibe?

As it turns out, Anthony and Rosemary have spent their entire lives in denial that they love one another.  Or they know they yearn for each other but won’t admit it.

Christopher Walken

Shanley’s screenplay tries to provide an explanation of sorts — and it’s equal parts batshit and bullshit. What you need to understand is that Anthony and Rosemary have stepped out of a Synge play about sexually repressed farmers in the early 20th century; they know all about breeding livestock but turn queasy at the thought of human reproduction.

Anyway,  the ailing Tony concludes there’s little likelihood that Anthony will marry and successfully work the farm.  So he offers to will the place to his American nephew Adam (John Hamm).  Adam is the sort of go-getter Yankee who rents a Rolls Royce to impress his Irish kin; one cannot imagine him mucking a stall.

“You don’t want to be a farmer,” sagely observes Anthony. “You want to own a farm. Not the same thing.”

On his visit to the Emerald Isle Adam is drawn to Rosemary (well, duh) and the ever-in-retreat Anthony prepares to fold and face a future of semi-monastic solitude.

That is until Emily — who’s damned tired of his wishy-washy vacillations — pushes him into a corner (during a fierce rainstorm that mimics the one in “The Quiet Man”) and demands that he reveal his feelings for her.

That “…Thyme” works at all can be attributed to the players, who approach some pretty iffy material with a winning combination of whimsy and sincerity.

Dornan has the toughest job.  An actor who has played serial killers and the sado-maso hero of the “50 Shades” universe, Dornan here must find a way to make appealing a social numbnuts whose behavior is borderline certifiable. He gets away with it because…well, because he looks like Jamie Dornan.  Which is to say his beauty trumps his character’s many drawbacks.

Blunt is one of my personal faves; here she wows as the girl next door with a thing for fixing tractors and, in her “me” time, doing a bit of ballet in the barnyard.

The real surprise is Walken. This once formidable actor, who in recent years has become a parody of himself, clearly relishes slipping into the skin of an aged Irish farmer.

By the way, the performers have been raked over the internet coals for their attempts at Irish accents — at least by Irish commentators. As a know-nothing ‘Merican I’ll have to take their word for it.

| Robert W. Butler