102 min | PG-13 | December 11, 2020 | Bleecker Street
Two Irish farm families share a fence and a lifetime of things left unsaid. Rosemary loves Anthony. He cannot say it back, and the film never figures out why that should take so long.
Wild Mountain Thyme is an Irish romance about two farm families who share a fence and decades of stalemate. Rosemary Muldoon has loved her neighbor Anthony Reilly since childhood. Anthony cannot bring himself to claim her or to say why. John Patrick Shanley adapts his own stage play and stakes everything on one withheld secret. The film wants that secret to read as poetry about a wounded heart. It plays as whimsy stretched past the point of sense.
Emily Blunt plays Rosemary with a fierce patience the film does not deserve. She smokes, she waits, and she lets longing curdle into something harder. Jamie Dornan plays Anthony as a closed door. He mumbles and stares at the middle distance, and the performance gives Blunt nothing to push against. Christopher Walken plays Tony Reilly, Anthony’s aging father, and his Irish accent abandons him in the first scene and never comes back. Jon Hamm arrives as Adam, the brash American cousin, and brings a brief jolt of energy the rest of the film cannot sustain.
Shanley directs his own script and never finds a rhythm between the comic and the sincere. The dialogue carries the cadence of a stage play, and the camera keeps cutting to landscape to insist it is not one. The cinematography lingers on rain-soaked green fields and low gray skies, and the imagery is genuinely lovely. The score leans on sentimental folk that pushes every scene toward feeling it has not earned. Shanley the writer trusts a metaphor that Shanley the director cannot dramatize, and the seam between them shows in every scene.
The frustrating part is that the pieces of a decent film are here. Blunt is committed, the setting is beautiful, and Shanley clearly loves this corner of Ireland. The wall around all of it is the central conceit, a revelation about Anthony so strange that it converts a grown man’s emotional paralysis into a punchline. A surer hand would cut it or own it. Shanley does neither and asks the audience to feel moved by a riddle that only makes the romance harder to believe. The film ends where it began, two people at a fence, and the years between them feel wasted on both sides of the screen.