Why can’t she make the move? I don’t know. As adults, Anthony (Jamie Dornan) and Rosemary (Emily Blunt) are still deeply in love with each other, but he is unable to make a move and she is frustrated by his lack of movement, but determined to wait for him. Anthony and Rosemary grow up next door to each other, their families closely knit and bonded by the grief of Chris and Mary’s untimely deaths. Meanwhile, young Anthony is having his own existential crisis, but internally, which leads to many people thinking he’s quite strange. Anyway, young Rosemary has an existential crisis about being “just a girl in a world full of girls.” To which her father responds that she’s a queen and plays her the score of Swan Lake, which will shape her outlook for the rest of her life. Except the part about the gates being opened and closed. Please trust me that none of that is as clear in the movie. Young Anthony living in his own world just before the whole debacle that leads to the gates. When Fiona laughs at Anthony’s odd ways, Rosemary fights her, so Anthony pushes Rosemary down, which leads to the Muldoons buying the portion of the Reilly’s land that abuts the road (which is where the spat occurred), which leads to there being two gates that must be opened and closed every time someone enters or leaves the Reilly’s farm, which I think is like a metaphor for the symbolic barriers between Rosemary and Anthony. When they’re still young children, Rosemary (Abigail Coburn) falls deeply in love with Anthony (Darragh O’Kane) but young Anthony yearns for Fiona (Anna Weekes). On the next farm over live the Muldoon family, Chris (Don Wycherley), Aoife (Dearbhla Molloy), and their daughter Rosemary. Then it goes back to long before his death when Tony Reilly, his wife Mary (Clare Barrett), and their son Anthony live together on a farm. Well, Christopher Walken isn’t dead, but his character Tony Reilly apparently is dead, which he says in the perfunctory way-voice rising slightly at the end-that only Christopher Walken could achieve. And then Christopher Walken informs us that he’s dead. The movie kicks off with exactly the kind of orchestral music and verdant green shots you’d expect a movie set in Ireland to kick off with. At least, not entirely in a negative way, but definitely partially in a negative way. Like you’ve joined someone’s fever dream, which I swear I don’t mean in a negative way. If you do all that, then it’s kind of compelling to watch? Or at least bizarrely fascinating. And that way you can just kind of go with the fact that it takes place without any real mooring to an actual time or place, has some very convoluted dialogue and themes, and moves at a pace not unlike honey when it’s on the brink of crystallization. (John Patrick Shanley, who wrote the movie and the play from which it was adapted, grew up in New York with an Irish immigrant family.) With that in mind, the accents-which range from authentic (I think) to leprechaun-kvetching-about-stolen-marshmallows to Christopher Walken-don’t sound quite so preposterous and distracting. Or perhaps it’s in someone’s interpretation of their ancestor’s water-colored, time-worn memories of Ireland. Honestly, I think the best way to approach the movie Wild Mountain Thyme is to think of it like an absurdist play set in a version of Ireland rather than the Ireland.
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