You have to admit, whether you like it or not, that a meaningful percentage of the Irish personality blooms and bursts with blarney. Nothing wrong about that. It’s likely every culture has some active blarney equivalent.
The question is how far you’re willing to go embracing it. Those game to do so will enthusiastically welcome Wild Mountain Thyme, the blarney-stoked film adaptation of John Patrick Shanley’s 2014 play, Outside Mullingar, which he also directs with cunning dexterity. Given the proper roll-out, this expanded version of the robust and utterly charming stage version could gather the same sort of idolatry accorded 1952’s The Quiet Man, the celluloid four-leaf clover that kept the vaunted careers of John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara aflame.
Here again it’s a thwarted romance, the end of which is inevitable but which relies on the circuitous path traveled to arrive satisfyingly at the fade-out clinches. Rosemary Muldoon (Emily Blunt) has had big eyes for Anthony Reilly (Jamie Dornan) ever since they were children. As adults, their coming together is slightly complicated by their living on adjacent farms where an underlying unpleasantness prevails concerning a disputed strip of connecting land.
Their halting progress is even more troubled by Jamie’s inability to believe in himself. When he practices proposing to Rosemary by facing off with a donkey and is spied on by village gossip Cleary (the lively Barry McGovern), he gives up on his intentions and even loses the wedding band.
Encouraging the betrothal to one extent or another are Rosemary’s widowed and ill mother Aoife (Dearbhla Molloy, brought along from the original Broadway cast for good reason) and Anthony’s widowed father Tony (Christopher Walken). A further fly in the hearty Mulligan stew is stern Tony’s suppressed love for a son he regards as having inherited too much of his mother’s pixilated Kelly genes to keep the premises thriving.
Tony’s worry leads to a broad expansion of Shanley’s original four-hander. He introduces nephew Adam (Jon Hamm), a canny American money manager. Tony thinks Adam, who visits the Reilly farm driving a Rolls Royce, will be the better heir than Anthony. This despite Anthony’s love of farming in contrast to Adam’s total ignorance of the requirements.
Slowly but not at all pace-affecting things come right for all in a series of alluring sequences. Whether they coalesce believably is a situation blarney-bitten audiences will gladly forgive and others won’t. For instance, Adam is positioned to put gentlemanly moves on Rosemary. The prospect looms as a problem for the timid, pining Anthony. but in a shifty near-denouement development it turns out not to be.
The always clever Shanley keeps up the appeal by never running out of irresistible scenes. Many of them feature Rosemary and Anthony doing their approach-avoidance jig. Two of the most memorable segments, however, place Tony in the spotlight. Perhaps the most stunning is an emotional exchange between Tony and Anthony , clearly the most probing father-son discussion they’ve ever allowed themselves. In it Walken gives a measured, red-eyed performance that ought to land him on this year’s Oscar Best Supporting Actor list, if there’s to be such a thing.
Throughout Wild Mountain Thyme, Shanley plants lines that spring up compellingly—among them, “Don’t you know better than to listen to people?” “No reply is a reply,” “The kind of dreams kids have [which] make adults miserable,” and “Feelings are useless.” The comments may resonate as truisms, but in Shanley’s context they land. Shanley also plants at least one gorgeous but superfluous symbol, Rosemary’s often uncontrollable stallion.
And Shanley has the actors to land them. Aside from Walken’s showing—is it the best of his long career?—the other leading players make gold from the green outside-Mullingar landscape. The beautiful Blunt, sometimes smoking enough to send signals across the surrounding hills, pulls off a rare thesping trick: demonstrating that great psychological strength can often contain fathomless vulnerability. Dornan, in a role diametrically opposed to his Christian of Fifty Shades of Grey, carries Anthony’s self-doubt as if it’s a boulder he’s carrying on his shoulders. Hamm, who never does anything reflecting his surname, lends needed humanity to a figure that lesser actors might render as only a two-dimensional universe master.
Then there’s the sheer look of Wild Mountain Thyme. Is it possible to film Ireland as anything other than a verdant paradise? Perhaps if a cinematographer sneaks into the dim corners of major cities. Stephen Goldblatt has no need to. Shanley’s transfer to the screen unfolds a symphonic world unable to be shown on stage, and Goldblatt does that for him.
These touches imbue Wild Mountain Thyme with the air of what New York Times critic Mel Gussow called—in his review of the play Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Shanley’s initial attention-getter in 1984—”a factitious fairy tale.” Costumer Triona Lillis isn’t as successful. She helps give the movie it’s familiar film-romance sheen. Throughout, Blunt and Dornan look as if they’re wearing clothes purchased at Orvis or Urban Outfitters only days before shooting commenced.
Shanley undoubtedly did himself a favor by naming his adapted play Wild Mountain Thyme after the beloved Irish tune. The sentimental verses were particularly loved by Tony’s late wife. The lambent ditty is sung twice in the movie, the first time by Rosemary. She’s aiming it at Tony, and Walken listening to it is another of the film’s tearful highlights. By the way, Ed Sheeran sings Wild Mountain Thyme. Were he to make a version available now on Spotify or wherever, he could give Shanley a nice promotional lift.
The song “Wild Mountain Thyme” contains the words “Would you go, lassie, go, and we’ll all go together.” Shanley uses it as a wily inducement to revel in the film Wild Mountain Thyme. Why not let’s all go together?
