The “why” of it never clicks, but the secret nature of his affliction is so intense that the one woman he whispers it to laughs so hard that she falls off a stone wall and nearly plummets to her death. And not just in love, but the kind of mad, inexplicable, pathological love that you typically only find in fairy tales and the DSM-V. The bad news is that Anthony is broken inside for some reason. The good news is that a beautiful and extremely eligible bachelorette named Rosemary Muldoon (Blunt) lives right on the other side of the gate, and she’s been in love with Anthony from the time they were wee. And since this is at its core a romantic comedy, “happiness” is just another word for “marriage.” Indeed, Tony won’t pass down the family farm to his only child unless Anthony finds himself a wife. If “Wild Mountain Thyme” is the fun-loving “Hillbilly Elegy” of the Irish farmlands - and it absolutely is - then Tony Reilly is its Mamaw. A plucky, hardscrabble widower who’s been tending to “the sweetest rise of land you ever saw” for his entire life, all Tony wants is for his weird and sexy son Anthony (Dornan, charming in an aggrieved sort of way) to find some happiness in this world. The truth will shamrock you to your bones. How do you completely dismiss something so guileless and unrestrained that it makes Richard Curtis seem like Raymond Carver? Something that invites Emily Blunt to turn up the lass-next-door charm so high that it breaks the knob clear off the dial? Something - and this is important - that opens with emerald green aerial shots of the Irish coast followed by voiceover narration of Christopher Walken cheerily declaring: “Welcome to Ireland, my name’s Tony Reilly, and I’m dead!”?Īnyone who manages not to spit out their Bailey’s right then and there might find themselves absorbed in the saccharine nonsense that follows, if only to learn the mystery behind why Jamie Dornan’s handsome farmer has resigned himself to a lifetime of unhappy bachelorhood. Shanley, whose script for “Moonstruck” suggests that he once had a slightly tighter handle on this sort of thing, brings his play “Outside Mullingar” to the screen like he’s trying to fill every close-up with enough whimsical enchantment to reach the back row of a Broadway theater. The lethal intensity of this effect cannot be overstated the only logical explanation for what happened here is that someone planted a bomb in Shanley’s editing bay and timed it to explode if any cut of “Wild Mountain Thyme” dipped below 50 kilohertz of cartoon Irish charm per minute. Needless to say, nobody got hurt.Īnd yet, for a movie that often feels like a feature-length infomercial for Aer Lingus and builds to what might just be the single most absurd reveal in the history of narrative fiction (I couldn’t explain it if I tried, and even Shanley himself appears to be unsure as to whether or not its worth taking seriously), “Wild Mountain Thyme” is awful hard to hate. ‘The Goldman Case’ Review: Cédric Kahn Weaves a Fascinating, True-Life Courtroom Drama
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