Wild Mountain Thyme (2020)

Wild Mountain Thyme is one of those confectionary baubles that takes up an hour or two of your time, does little to nothing important and then starts exiting your brain twenty minutes before it is over.  I’ve just seen it and I find that I have to write this review rather quickly before it completely disappears.

I have nothing against light-as-a-feather material as long as there is some sense that what I am watching is at least malleable while I am watching it.  But this movie is such a feckless chunk of nothing.  It’s like one of those romance novels that your grandmother reads.  It’s got words that mean nothing, a plot that you could describe on a cocktail napkin and characters who are placeholders rather than people.

For reasons unknown, Christopher Walken plays Tony Reilly who has been designated to narrate this little Irish tale – in an Irish accent!  Yes, Walken, a native of Astoria New York sports an Irish accent in this movie, and no, he does not prove a mastery for dialect.  Reilly owns a small farm that borders on the property of the family Muldoon, blissfully unaware that his son Anthony (Jamie Dornan, still as  much a block of wood as he was in Fifty Shades) has carried on a lifelong crush for the Muldoon’s daughter Rosemary (Emily Blunt).

Naturally, since Anthony and Rosemary are passionately in love, this means they can’t be together.  Why?  Because the screenplay keeps coming up with every kind of petty and undefinable reason to keep them apart until the credits roll.

The real heartbreaker here is that the writer and director is John Patrick Shanley, the playwright who wrote not only Moonstruck and Doubt but also Joe Versus the Volcano.  He knows his way around a great romance.  So why was this one so uninvolving, so sudsy, so flat?  What happened here?  Shanley has proven that he has great instincts as a creative mind, but this has the consistency of a kitchen sponge.  What a disappointment.