Peter Viney's Blog

Directed by John Patrick Shanley
Screenplay by John Patrick Shanley
Based on the play “Outside Mullingar” by John Patrick Shanley

Music composed by Amelia Warner

Released December 2020 in the USA, April 2021 (internet) in the UK

CAST

Emily Blunt – Rosemary Muldoon
Jamie Dornan – Anthony Reilly
Dearbhla Molloy- Aoife Muldoon
Christopher Walken – Tony Reilly
Jon Hamm – Adam, Anthony’s cousin
+
Lydia McGuinness – Eleanore (girl from pub)
Danielle Ryan – Maeve (woman on plane)
Don Wycherley – Chris Muldoon (Rosemary’s dad)
Barry McGovern – Cleary
Tommy O’Neill- Uncle Frank
Clare Barrett- Mary Reilly

The second film we watched in two days which is (a) based on a famous stage play (b) screenplay by the playwright (c) directed by the playwright. This is a romantic comedy.

The play Outside Mullingar was a Broadway success in 2014. It must have been a very different thing, as the film rests so much on the rich emerald Irish countryside, and so much takes place out of doors. Plus it goes to New York, and we have scenes on board a plane. Dearbhla Molloy (Aoife) was also in the Broadway play. I haven’t seen the play but they only list a cast of four online … the four main ones.

To say the film got a critical drubbing is an understatement. The Irish press had started on the accents before anyone even saw it. We saw it the evening of our Covid Booster jab. We had planned in advance to watch something light, funny and relaxing. It ticked all those boxes. It’s like the well-known phenomenon of watching a romantic film at 36,000 feet in a plane after two glasses of wine and weeping copiously onto your plastic tray with inedible remnants. Your defences are down (though we didn’t drink on the day before the jab or the day of the jab). Whatever, we thoroughly enjoyed the film, the scenery, the actors, the music, the plot. Yep, loved it.

Plot

I’m not going to give enough way to spoil watching it. There are no interior photos on IMDB, though a lot takes place indoors. They went for outdoor stills. WEATHER warning: there is a great deal of rain and thunder throughout. This is Ireland. It’s why it’s the Emerald Isle.

Rosemary (Emily Blunt) and Anthony (Jamie Dorman) are the lone remaining children at two farms. We come in after they’ve buried Rosemary’s dad. Rosemary is with her mother, Aiofe (Dearbhla Molloy) and Anthony lives with his dad, Tony (Christopher Walken). For the uninitiated who like to read aloud, Aiofe is more or less ‘Eve’ written in Irish.

Very briefly then, Tony is worried about whether Anthony is fit to run the farm, as he never displays much enthusiasm. He’s diffident. Rosemary is a powerful female figure who has always had her heart set on Anthony. Tony considers selling the farm to his nephew, Adam (Jon Hamm). It is obligatory in Irish dramas to have a wealthy “Yank” relative, and it’s Adam.

Aiofe and Jack die in turn. Whatever you hear about Christopher Walken’s accent, he has the perfect expressive face, and his performance as the 75 year old Tony is a tour de force.

Rosemary wants to visit New York and sees a ballet with Adam. She does it in two days. The watching ballet scene is mainly close up on Emily Blunt, and she emotes beautifully.

Rosemary is nothing if not passionate. She needs to force Anthony to realize he loves her, and by bejesus, with the help of two small half tumblers of Guinness, she does. That’s not a plot spoiler. You should have guessed that right at the start.

Some critics were worried by the Irish magical stuff about bees and swans, but they haven’t read enough of the literaure.

The beginning, a flashback to the ten year old Rosemary and Anthony may be an issue. It makes you think you’re about to watch The Railway Children or Pollyanna. It is essential in having the scene where her dad tells her she’s a white swan, and in seeing Anthony with his nose in a flower, but gives the wrong idea about what’s to come.

Language

The dialogue sounds Martin McDonagh-lite. There are some lovely Irish lines in there, but none of the viciousness of McDonagh’s plots. John Patrick Shanley is Irish-American. Martin McDonagh is London-Irish. Neither are Irish. Both are cruising for a bruising from Irish critics. McDonagh improved, but I recently reviewed The Beauty Queen of Leenane on stage, another play set in a kitchen next to a peat burning range with rain pouring down outside. We discussed this, and McDonagh’s Irish-English is, as I suspected, OTT (Over The Top) in that play. Not later, I think. McDonagh’s language was as much influenced by J.M. Synge and The Playboy of The Western World as it was to summer holidays in the West of Ireland. The play is dear to my heart … Karen and I met performing in it. The point is that Synge spoke English and Gaeilge … Irish Gaelic. In his dialogue, he tried to show what a Gaelic speaker would sound like if they were speaking Gaelic, by repeating Irish language patterns. He was NOT trying to show Irish-English. So, an analogy, in the sitcom ‘Allo ‘Allo, we have French characters who are speaking English, but supposed to be speaking French which is indicated like this: Is it that you have a bad at the head, my little cabbage? If they speak English, they change to RP. Unlike McDonagh, I think Shanley succeeds in NOT going Over The Top while sounding as if it’s Irish-English (NOT Gaeilge) to an international audience. So a “not guilty.” But at least one use of “so” at the end of a sentence in normal Irish-English emphasis gets the timing and intonation wrong.

Accents

 “Fatally undermined by dodgy accents and a questionable story, Wild Mountain Thyme is a baffling misfire for a talented filmmaker and impressive cast.
Rotten Tomatoes

Before we dig into the pungent and chunky Irish stew that is “Wild Mountain Thyme,” let us first talk about the accents. They’re a problem, and they’re all over the place. Granted, an Irish accent is among the hardest to master, unless you possess Streepian levels of mimicry abilities. Hell, I’m 44 percent Irish according to my latest Ancestry.com DNA analysis—which explains the hereditary alcoholism and inability to tan—and I wouldn’t even play around with one while joking with friends, much less as the star of a motion picture. And yet, here we have a bevy of established actors doing just that, with varying degrees of success.Jamie Dorman is the most accomplished, unsurprisingly, since he’s Irish himself—albeit from Belfast, several hours away on the opposite coast from County Mayo where “Wild Mountain Thyme” is set, Emily Blunt’s is wobblier than you’d expect, given that her musical theater background should, in theory, provide her a strong ear for such a challenge. And then there’s Christopher Walken, who’s essentially delivering his lines in his trademark, halting style, with just the slightest bit of a brogue sprinkled on top. It’s … awkward. It’s as if he’s barely even trying, which perhaps is for the better. **
Christy Lemire, Roger Ebert.com

They really got hit on accents, both by the Irish and British press. So what’s an Irish accent? The Dublin feckin’ urban feckin’ accent is very different to the lilting west of Ireland, let alone the harsh Belfast accent or the softer rural Ulster accent on the Antrim coast. That would be as far as my ear goes. An Irish person must be able to distinguish far more nuances. The play is set in ‘middle Ireland.’ Logically, these four people were born and have lived at two neighbouring farms so they should have a single regional accent.

Tony Reilly narrates the story after he’s died. As soon as it started, Karen said, ‘Sounds more American …’ Christopher Walken does a wonderfully irascible old and sick Irish farmer, but to us had the worst accent drift. Not being Irish, we got past in in five minutes and it ceased to trouble us.

Jamie Dorman who plays Anthony is Northern Irish, and features in Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, as well as being a tip for the next James Bond. We noticed nothing awry.

Dearbhla Molloy is Irish, and was in the Broadway play, as well as being in Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman set in Northern Ireland. She was born in Dublin and has appeared in most modern Irish plays.

Emily Blunt is English, born in London, naturally RP, but has lived in North America for several years.

Music

This is a strong point throughout. There are three aspects, Swan Lake, the original score, and the song, Wild Mountain Thyme.

Swan Lake is the running theme from when Rosemary’s dad told her she was a white swan. The music is played several times, and in New York she goes to watch the ballet for the first time.

Amelia Warners orchestral score references the title song, but much else.

Rosemary sings Wild Mountain Thyme in the pub to evoke memories of his dead wife for Tony. She’s accompanied by the pub band, a sepia bunch who seem encrusted in the pub wall. They do it real, she acts in a hesitation as if trying to recall the words. At the end they reprise it with Jamie Dornan as Anthony starting off and her coming up to join him, again in the pub and real, no enhancing or string orchestras wafting in from the ether. Even better, everyone who has appeared, dead or alive, is filmed sitting in the audience watching. They all join in.

The song gives its title to the film. This traditional song is usually known as either Wild Mountain Thyme or Will Ye Go, Lassie, Go, and had been done by everyone from Scottish folkie Alex Campbell to The Clancy Brothers, The Byrds, Van Morrison and Joan Baez. Dylan performed it solo at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1969 (see below). Emily Blunt has absolutely no reason to feel intimidated by those others. And she’s better-looking.

The consensus has it as Scottish, rather than Irish (Will ye go, lassie, go ), in spite of The Clancy Brothers version. The original song was known as The Braes of Balqhuidder and it moved to Ireland where it was adapted by the McPeake Family then moved back to Scotland. It’s best described as Scots-Irish.

The end theme, I’ll Be Singing, was written by John Patrick Shanley with the soundtrack composer, Amelia Warner. Recorded by Sinead O’Connor. I bought it on iTunes right away along with both versions of Wild Mountain Thyme. An extract from I’ll Be Singing:

With your old coat and your eyes of fire
Up the steep slope of the mountain higher
We will go
We will go

And when you come to my window, laddie
I’ll be singing
When you come to my window, laddie
What a joy

Shaney has reversed Go lassie go to Come laddie come.

MY RATING

****

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

They got nasty … and notice how the English reviewers were more critical of the accents than the ‘Irish Times’ was.

Anyway, the Irish Times was much nicer than others:

Before being unfair, let us be fair(ish) and acknowledge that, by the standards of the last century, the accents aren’t that bad. Some fun has already been had at Christopher Walken’s expense, but this is not a stinker to compare with Tom Cruise in Far and Away or Mickey Rourke in A Prayer for the Dying. Blunt (South Wandsworth) and Dornan (South Belfast) don’t exactly embarrass themselves with their assault on the midlands.
Donald Clarke, Irish Times 11 November 2020

I think this is (yet another) case of with Emily Blunt starring in so many varied roles, and Jamie Dornan tipped as James Bond, they all wanted to have a go.

The Guardian did it twice:

It is worth mentioning that Walken’s accent is especially bad as the crotchety Tony Reilly, waxing about the long history of his family’s farm abutting that of Chris Muldoon, whose rain-soaked wake precedes the first scene. Muldoon’s daughter Rosemary (Emily Blunt, sadly also a casualty of the accent curse) grew up pining for Tony’s boy, Anthony, played as an awkward, introverted adult by the Northern Irish but still accent-afflicted actor Jamie Dorman.

Adrian Horton, The Guardian 9 December 2020

There’s a sublime awfulness and condescension to this American vision of Ireland, adapted by writer-director John Patrick Shanley from his Broadway stage hit: a mind-boggling stew of bizarre paddywhackery that makes John Ford’s The Quiet Man look like a documentary about crack dealers. Two of its stars, Emily Blunt and Christopher Walken- both playing Irish people – engage in a colossal intergenerational battle for who can do the worst Irish accent. Blunt and Walken’s brogue-off makes this the King Kong v Godzilla event of inauthentic Irish voices.
Peter Bradshaw The Guardian 30 April 2021

What in the name of holy bejaysus and all the suffering saints is this benighted cowpat? When the poster first emerged for Wild Mountain Thyme, more than a few Irish film fans wetted their lips dramatically. Let us be honest. We enjoy getting annoyed at phoney Paddywhackery almost as much as we enjoy ranting about the British claiming Saoirse Ronan …
Donald Clarke, Irish Times 11 November 2020