Wild Mountain Thyme review – head-scratching romcom with a baffling sting

John Patrick Shanley's Wild Mountain Thyme arrives with the air of a fake film-within-a-film, though it is, supposedly, something that's meant to be taken at face value. It couldn’t have come from a filmmaker with a more chaotic filmography – Oscar-winning director of Moonstruck and Doubt, but also writer of Joe Versus the Volcano, Congo, and We're Back! A Dinosaur Story. This one has more in common with those latter misfires, a film that wears its unashamed Irishness not merely on its sleeve, but on its green-painted forehead, upon which there might as well sit one of those novelty St. Patrick's Day hats.

Adapted from Shanley's own award-winning play, it announces itself through the voice of Christopher Walken – cast here for reasons that no explanation will ever fully justify – and his garbled attempt at sounding Irish. “I’m dead,” his farmer Tony Reilly informs us right away via a bouncy voiceover, setting the stage for the strangest inheritance comedy since Mr. Popper's Penguins. 

Will Tony leave the farm to his dopey son, Anthony, played by actual Irishman Jamie Dornan? It seems inevitable, yet the movie spends an hour mulling it over anyway. Of more pressing concern is Anthony's beautiful, no-nonsense neighbour, Rosemary, a pipe smoking loner inhabited for some reason by Emily Blunt (seemingly far too good for this, until she opens her mouth) who has loved him since childhood. It’s not so much will-they-won’t-they as “what-the-hell-they”?

Problem is, the movie does a poor job of explaining why these two aren’t together when there are no obstacles in their way. In fact, it’s never clear why anything is happening in Wild Mountain Thyme, which plays as though scenes were simply cut at random. When a semblance of explanation about the romance finally arrives via a late stage “twist,” it’s the sort to make M. Night Shyamalan’s lesser reveals look like strokes of genius. That is to assume it even counts as a twist, since it bears no relation to the story we've been told, or reality itself, as unfounded in its arrival as the 1950s-like world that smothers this “modern day” piece.

That said, it’s actually rather watchable. No performance could be deemed good, but the film emanates a strange glow that means it’s never quite boring, never quite uninteresting – there are too many questionable choices on display for that. Like Jon Hamm’s smarmy American cousin, who arrives only to offer up further proof that no film quite knows what to do with this former Mad Man. He’s meant to be a complication but the movie can’t quite commit. It's just one of countless perplexing decisions made across 102 very baffling minutes. Still, watched with friends, washed down with a few pints of Guinness (or ten), you could just as well add another star to the rating. Assuming you’re not Irish.

Wild Mountain Thyme is now streaming on various digital platforms.