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Wild Mountain Thyme was a movie in some ways damned before it was ever released. The trailer joined the illustrious company of Cats and Sonic the Hedgehog in the world of promos that the internet universally made fun of, with the accents mocked for being wide of the mark (like, the whole North Atlantic Ocean, wide of the mark.)
The trailer was also mocked for being rife with the sort of Irish stereotypes that only Americans think are real—the sort of viewers who claim Irish heritage and dye their rivers and beer green for St. Patrick's Day but have never actually thought of Ireland as a modern place where people live.
Unfortunately, the full-length Wild Mountain Thyme does not improve on the promo's failings. Right from the off, it is a film that fell out of the stereotype tree and hit every branch on the way down—the fact that it does not start with the narrator saying "top o' the morning t' ya" is the only thing stopping viewers getting a full house on their paddywhackery cliché bingo card.
Director John Patrick Shanley's Ireland in the movie is a place where people only drink Guinness and listen to fiddle music, and where nothing has moved on since about the late 19th century when Irish immigration to America was at its height. The world feels so old fashioned, in fact, that it is a genuine shock in an early scene where we see a television set and learn that we are not, in fact, in the 1890s.
This old-fashioned world, however, has very modern A-listers populating it. Early on, the film introduces Anthony, who will grow up to be played by Jamie Dornan, asking God, "why did you make me so."
Sadly, this is not him questioning his sexuality, and the film is not about a young boy discovering his homosexuality as in the excellent recent Irish Amazon Prime Video movie Dating Amber. Instead, he has a strange mental affliction which will not be spoiled here (though here's a hint—think Sean Bean in Jupiter Ascending).
Incidentally, one of the few joys of the film is how this problem is dropped like a lead weight at the end of the movie.
This young man is in love with Rosemary, soon to be played by Emily Blunt as a pipe-smoking, lady farmer able to go toe-to-toe against any man.
Blunt has proven time and time again that she is a versatile actor, from her cutting assistant par excellence in The Devil Wears Prada to her shell-shocked FBI agent in Sicario. What she cannot do, however, is an Irish accent.
Perhaps that is not fair. Perhaps what she had instead is a director who simply doesn't care.
Wild Mountain Thyme director John Patrick Shanley has responded to those who found the accents bad and the whole thing too stereotypical in interviews. Speaking to Variety, for example, he said: "I told Emily when we first talked about this project, 'I'm not making this movie for the Irish. If you try to get the Irish to love you, no good will come of it.'"
This quote more or less sums up the film's problems. Both the quote and movie have a gentle contempt for real Irish people that puts the blame on them for not liking the movie, rather than ever thinking that its roll-call of dull over-played stereotypes could make for a bad film.
Shanley continues: "I'm making this movie for everybody else and all the people who want to go to Ireland." Well, mission failed. The scenic shots are sure to appeal to Hibernophiles, but they are likely to be less moved by any scene involving an actual person.
Ultimately, the film's biggest problem is not that the accents are shonky or that the view of Ireland is clichéd. Its biggest issue is that it is dramatically inert.
Blunt and Dornan lack chemistry (mostly because of the accent Blunt is weighed down with), and the film takes way too long dealing with a question of who owns some land which is ultimately totally irrelevant.
The movie also has major problems with tone that would still sink it even if its accent were Meryl Streep/Saoirse Ronan-level precise and its picture of the country nuanced.
One of Shanley's finest works was the play Doubt, which he also directed to strong effect. Wild Mountain Thyme features dialogue exchanges with all the weighty theatrical seriousness of that play, but will then cut to a dog reaction shot like something out of a '90s sitcom or repeatedly make a lame joke about a donkey.
Though the film does redeem its stereotypes slightly by having Jon Hamm as an American who dreams of being an Irish farmer—which seems to satirize this trope in films like John Ford's overrated The Quiet Man—it is too little too late.
Ultimately, the film feels like a pint of green beer on St. "Patty's" Day—ostensibly resembling Irishness, but no true Irish person would go near it, and it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.
