Wild Mountain Thyme

The soggy romance between lifelong pastoral neighbors Rosemary Muldoon (Blunt) and Anthony Reilly (Dornan) isn’t the only thing that’s all wet in Wild Mountain Thyme, John Patrick Shanley’s film adaptation of his stage drama Outside Mullingar set on the perpetually rainy Emerald Isle. But it presents the movie’s biggest challenge: How do you spark a love story between two people when the romantic tension between them is unspoken? Or at least, only mumbled under the breath?

In an early flashback narrated by Anthony’s father (Walken, speaking with a wobbly brogue made wobblier by that unmistakable cadence), a lovesick Rosemary first expresses an interest in Anthony around age ten. However, he unceremoniously knocks her to the ground when she makes a play for him, unaware of her affections. In the ensuing years of young adulthood, an unmarried Anthony remains clueless and an unmarried Rosemary remains silently besotted, each still residing on a family farm nearby the other, the clock ticking as their futures loom with a big question mark.

Counter to intuition, director/screenwriter Shanley, who gave us the perfect parable Doubt and exquisite comic romance Moonstruck, fragments the storyline here in a way in which time frustratingly plods ahead as the two characters stay the same distance apart (with one false start), with the deaths of their parents being the only real changes in their lives. The movie increasingly feels stretched out, leaving you with nothing to root for except maybe its conclusion. It all comes to a head during a downpour (natch) in broad daylight (unnatch) in which Anthony reveals to Rosemary the emotionally stunting secret to which he has obliquely referred at other times in the film, a confession that inexplicably liberates him to finally express love for his childhood friend in big Hollywood fashion. Listen closely, because when you hear it, you’ll wonder if you heard it right. All of sudden, Shanley gets a bit twee.

The two leads are watchable enough, but the script keeps their characters emotionally separated, so you never see anything remotely like chemistry between them. Blunt registers Rosemary’s independence without going full-on Maureen O’Hara, and her mumbling observations about Anthony’s strangeness are delivered with just the right amount of sarcasm. But Shanley’s frequent symbolic visual references to Rosemary’s unruly horse undercut the subtleties of the character – at least, that’s not how you see her. Dornan’s Anthony is sweet in a lost-little-boy kind of way, looking credibly daft as he walks around the farm wearing a white trench coat with a metal detector inexplicably in hand. The joke is that Anthony is cursed with a family madness, a speculation occasionally borne out by his innocently eccentric behavior. Anyone who proposes marriage to a donkey on bended knee in an open field must be a catch, right? Maybe only in the movies.