Mark Reviews Movies: WILD MOUNTAIN THYME

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 10, 2020

How emotionally constipated can the leads of a romantic comedy be before we start to think they'd be better off spending their lives alone? That seems like the challenge writer/director John Patrick Shanley has given himself in Wild Mountain Thyme, a comedy about the lengths a group of Irish farmers will go to hide their feelings. It's also a romance that undoubtedly suffers for that gag.

The woman in this equation, for example, has loved her neighbor, the guy in the romantic problem, since childhood. She proves it by holding a grudge against him for decades. He allegedly pushed her when they were kids. To try to make the child realize the error of his ways and always remember her existence, the young girl had her father build two gates over a plot of land her family owned.

That section of land, by the way, is also the one that the neighbors have to use to leave their own farm. The land and the gates, which have to be opened and closed every time the neighbors leave or return to their farm, have been the talk of these families ever since. In a way, then, the plan definitely worked. In another way, though, what exactly is the guy meant to take from this scheme? If these two talked in any rationally straightforward way about their emotions, the shoving incident, the gates, and the decades of silence about how they really feel for each other could have been avoided.

We wouldn't, though, have a story, then, and that's the dilemma of both the plot and our ability to really connect to any of these characters. Shanley, adapting his play Outside Mullingar, has more or less written himself into a corner here. That's kind of the point, as we watch characters, who have been born and bred to keep their feelings in check to the point of petty feuds and near-delusional thinking, continually sabotage any chance for happiness they obviously possess—and right in front of them, too.

There's nothing especially different about this setup from any generic romantic comedy, except that the obstacles to a happy ending are entirely about personality and not about plot contrivances. In theory, that's the more rewarding course for such a story. These characters and their personal quirks, though, are so odd, so stifling, and so overwhelming that we too often think that, maybe, they're better off as friendly-enough foes than whatever mess they would be as lovers.

The woman is Rosemary (Emily Blunt), who has loved Anthony (Jamie Dornan), her neighbor, since the two were children. In adulthood, Rosemary's father, who gifted her the land where the gates are a minor but persistent inconvenience for Anthony's family, has died. Anthony's father Tony (Christopher Walken), a widower, invites Aoife (Dearbhla Molloy), his newly widowed neighbor, over to discuss the gates. She has no say in the matter. That's entirely up to Rosemary, who has no intention of removing the gates, as long as Anthony remains aloof to her always-hidden feelings for him.

How long and through how many complications can this last? As it turns out, the answers are a long time and multiple. Anthony, convinced he'll never be happy as a farmer or in life in general, is distressed to learn that Tony wants the farm to pass on to his American nephew Adam (Jon Hamm) after he dies. This makes him even more miserable.

Rosemary wants Anthony to realize he loves her, but she keeps him at distance, mocks him, and eventually starts the self-sabotaging romance tactics with Anthony's cousin—maybe to get Anthony's attention or maybe because Adam actually gives her some attention for once. Meanwhile, Anthony is considering the idea of proposing to Rosemary. He practices on a donkey and loses the ring he plans to give her, leading to rumors that he has lost his mind—in love with a donkey and, for reasons we know but no one else does, wandering the fields with a metal detector.

Obviously, some of this, such as the dramatic irony with the metal detector, is genuinely funny. Dornan is amusingly sweet as Anthony, who sees himself as a tragic figure but is too big a fool to comprehend how foolish he appears and is. Blunt plays Rosemary with an appropriate level of sternness, although Shanley has perhaps written the character a bit too stern for the good of the central romance (The climactic scene, set in Rosemary's house during a storm, feels sincerely threatening, instead of jokingly so). Hamm plays the banker with unlikely fantasies of becoming a farmer with straight-faced charm, and Walken, barely bothering with an Irish dialect, has some fun with his role.

Shanley's central conceit that the plot of a romantic comedy can primarily be driven by characters—what they say and do or, as is more appropriate here, what they refuse to say or are incapable of doing—is admirable. He takes the idea a few steps too far with Wild Mountain Thyme, which seems intent on keeping the audience at as much of a distance from the characters as the characters put between themselves.

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