Jon Hamm plays him with all-American, capitalistic swagger and greed (and, mercifully, no accent), and he serves as our conduit in marveling at this place that’s wondrous yet stuck in time.
And so we must wait 102 minutes for them to acknowledge they’ve secretly been in love with each other all this time.īut the arrival from New York of Anthony’s cousin, Adam, eventually shakes Rosemary and Anthony from their romantic détente. Besides knowing everything about each other, sharing decades of history and enjoying a lively chemistry, they’re the only single, gorgeous people of their age around. A slight from childhood, which we see in an early flashback, and the rights to a small piece of land connecting their families’ properties serve as insurmountable obstacles to the fact that they’re clearly meant for one another. But these characters are barely more than a collection of quirks, and the thing that’s keeping them from being together forever has got to be the most ridiculous of all contrivances.īlunt and Dornan co-star as Rosemary Muldoon and Anthony Reilly-Tony’s son-who’ve grown up in this rural wonderland and spent all their lives on neighboring farms. At times, the dialogue leaps and snaps, as you’d expect from the Oscar-winning writer of “ Moonstruck.” Everyone’s so handsome and there are SO many cozy sweaters and clunky boots to enjoy on those rainy days. In the midst of all this eye-catching idyll (the work of cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt) is a romantic comedy desperately straining for the lightness of a fairy tale. After the third or fourth time you see sweeping aerial shots of lush, verdant hills with the sound of lilting pan flutes playing the background, you half expect to see a leprechaun bounding across the countryside, hiding from those kids who are “after me Lucky Charms.” And in trotting out myriad Irish stereotypes, it’s hard to tell whether he means them earnestly or as knowing self-parody. In adapting his Broadway play Outside Mullingar for the screen, Shanley still aims for big, theatrical emotions, resulting in a film that’s relentlessly whimsical. Over and over again, you won’t know whether to feel baffled or amused-although by the end, the former feeling most assuredly dominates the latter. These three sentences set the tone for the rest of John Patrick Shanley’s film in the conflicted reaction they’ll stir in you. It’s as if he’s barely even trying, which perhaps is for the better.īut it also serves as a distraction right off the top, when we hear Walken say in an enthusiastic voiceover at the film’s start: “Welcome to Ireland.
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.
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. Jamie Dornan 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. And yet, here we have a bevy of established actors doing just that, with varying degrees of success.
0 kommentar(er)
