The Trailer for Wild Mountain Thyme Is a Baffling Affront to Irishness
Another week, another trailer that causes slack-jawed confusion. What is the meaning behind this film and why is Emily Blunt in it?
Sometimes in a movie there is a funny bit with a fake movie. You know the kind. We laugh at the recognisable stars doing broad accents and delivering cliched lines – purposely melodramatic trailers spoofing this crazy thing we call cinema. It's a laugh!
But sometimes there are real movies that look like fake movies. Wild Mountain Thyme (it is really called that) is one such film. “Welcome to Ireland,” the peppy narration tells us in this new trailer – cue the green, rolling hills, upbeat music played on a fiddle, a CGI bird. The only thing missing is a Leprechaun. The rest is quite frankly baffling and hilarious in equal measure. Please, watch the trailer here:
Directed by John Patrick Shanley, based on his play Outside Mullingar, this is not dissimilar in plot to his own Oscar-winning film Moonstruck. But what Moonstruck did not have was terrible Irish accents, while this film has plenty. Can you imagine the poor person who had to put this on the internet, knowing full well what the result was going to be the second they pressed “upload”? You just know their hand hovered over the button for a little too long, before… too late… gone.
We need to talk about Christopher Walken, who is trying to sound Irish but in fact sounds like Christopher Walken doing a terrible Irish accent while playing a parlour game at Christmas and accidentally making the family laugh with the rubbishness of it. I understand why Jamie Dornan is here, but Emily Blunt? Isn't Emily Blunt one of the world's most sought after actors? At what point did she decide it was necessary to risk a film where she would be standing across from Christopher Walken attempting to sound Irish?
Accents and casting aside (though how can we get past those aspects?), the movie has all the goofy appeal of an SNL sketch. The costumes, the horses, the horse antics – I'm just not making any sense of how a film like this came together in 2020. Jon Hamm? At one point, somebody falls off a boat into a lake. It is not, according to any source, a parody. Even though it's called Wild Mountain Thyme. As always, we must reiterate: this is a trailer, not the final product. But as a marketing device it makes the trailer for Hillbilly Elegy look like a work of careful cultural nuance.
Wild Mountain Thyme is set for release on December 11.
