Movie Reviews: Wild Mountain Thyme is as ridiculous as you'd hope
Jamie Dornan and Emily Blunt in Wild Mountain Thyme.
(15A) triumphed at last weekend’s Oscars, winning Best Film, Best Director for Chloé Zhao and Best Actress for Frances McDormand — her third Oscar — for her portrayal of Fern, an aging drifter who packs up her battered white van and hits the road when the company she works for goes bust. Effectively a migrant worker — she picks beets, takes seasonal commissions, works as a guide in National Parks — Fern is of retirement age, but can’t afford to live on the meagre benefits package.
More importantly, perhaps, Fern has no desire to settle down in any one place: moving around, living out of her van, Fern finds herself ‘connecting with a true community and tribe’ of like-minded drifters, and thriving on the kindness of strangers. Chloé Zhao creates a quasi-documentary film about Fern’s experiences, casting real-life nomads – Swankie, Linda May, Bob — who regale Fern with their life stories, their joys and tragedies, and the reasons why they opted out of the American Dream for a life less ordinary. The story, like Fern herself, tends to drift and meander, but the absence of a conventional dramatic structure doesn’t mean the film lacks intensity, and especially once the viewer realises that McDormand’s co-stars are testifying to their lived experience.
It’s an incredibly intimate film, in part because the dialogue is very raw and close to the bone (and delivered in long, unfiltered close-ups), but also because much of the story is spent in Fern’s tiny van, which results in a sense of claustrophobia that contrasts sharply with the vast, empty and alien-seeming landscapes she travels through as she traverses the American northwest. McDormand is in phenomenal form here, once more displaying the extent of her range as she quietly but compellingly comes to embody the spirit of independence that America once prided itself on. (Disney+)
From the sublime to the ridiculous, and (12s), which centres on the thwarted romance between Irish farmer Rosemary (Emily Blunt) and her neighbour Anthony (Jamie Dornan). While Rosemary pines for her childhood sweetheart Anthony, our wellie-booted Romeo seems oddly reluctant to marry, this despite the best efforts of his matchmaking father, Tony (Christopher Walken). Frustrated by Anthony’s lack of passion, Tony takes drastic steps, inviting his American nephew Adam (Jon Hamm) to Ireland with a view to selling him the farm.
The trailer for added greatly to the gaiety of the nation some months ago, with its wildly inaccurate accents and its apparently straight-faced portrayal of bog-trotting rural-types, and Patrick Thomas Shanley’s film (he directs an adaptation of his own stage play, Outside Mullingar) certainly provides plenty of opportunities for anyone keen to be offended by ‘Oirish’ stereotypes of feisty redheads and gormless suitors stomping around their muddy fields.
Whether Emily Blunt and Jamie Dornan are playing it straight or keeping it all deadpan as they spoof Irish-American expectations of the Oul’ Sod is up to the viewer to judge, but Blunt, in particular, is hilarious as the flame-haired, no-nonsense heroine who finally, desperately, attempts to woo her intended by repeatedly offering to make him a sandwich. There’s more than a touch of Fr Dougal to Jamie Dornan’s portrayal of Anthony, it’s true, although even there it’s nice to see Dornan sending up his heartthrob persona by stooging about in service to Blunt’s brutal one-liners. Meanwhile, Christopher Walken is either inspired or deluded as the semi-articulate patriarch: either way, you’ll not see its like again.
Charming, whimsical and preposterous by turns, is all you hoped it might be. (digital release)
Set in Dublin in 2003, (15A) stars Dean-Charles Chapman as Matthew, a young man looking forward to his first summer of freedom after leaving school. When Matthew and his friends Rez (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) and Kearney (Finn Cole) witness a tragic accident, however, they are affected in very different ways, and soon the trio are locked into a downward spiral of booze, drugs, violence and nihilism.
Adapted by Eoin Macken from Rob Doyle’s novel, with Macken directing, has important things to say about toxic masculinity and self-entitled male privilege but does so in a rather clumsy fashion. Matthew, Rez and Kearney aren’t so much characters as archetypes — the sensitive one, the ‘hyper-aggressive one’, the introspective one — and while Cole, in particular, offers a bristling presence as the abrasive, self-loathing Kearney, it’s difficult to empathise with their respective plights.
Anya Taylor-Joy shines as Matthew’s girlfriend Jen, and the film is visually inventive as it blends reality and the boys’ perceptions of who they think they should aspire to be, but those characterisations are too crude to fully persuade. (digital release)
