Image: Bleecker Street
Good new movies aren’t hard to come by, even in a year as strange as 2020, and neither are bad ones. But it’s not every week you stumble upon a film so baffling that you forget about “good” or “bad” completely, and know only that you need to talk about it immediately with anyone you can.
Wild Mountain Thyme, written and directed by John Patrick Shanley and based on one of his own stage plays, is one of those movies. It opens with voiceover narration by Christopher Walken — doing what sounds even to my untrained American ear like a terrible Irish accent — cheerfully proclaiming that he is dead. By the end of the movie, that line won’t even rank as the fifth most perplexing thing about it.
But its weirdness creeps up on you. For much the film’s run time, it stays at a low simmer. You might even assume everything is in order, if you aren’t paying attention too closely. There’s some business about a man named Anthony (Jamie Dornan), who’s upset his father (Walken) won’t leave the family farm to him, and about a woman named Rosemary (Emily Blunt), who owns the neighboring farm and is clearly in love with Anthony. We know from the opening narration that Tony, Walken’s character, will die at some point, and from centuries of storytelling that Anthony and Rosemary are destined for some sort of romance, and indeed both of those things come to pass.
Actually listen, however, and you may start to notice that nothing about how any of this happens adds up to recognizable human behavior. Take the question of Anthony inheriting the farm: The reason Tony is reluctant to pass it on to him, as he explains in a roundabout conversation sprinkled with folksy turns of phrase, is that he worries Anthony has inherited his late mother’s family’s history of mental instability. The proof Tony lays out is that Anthony 1) likes to fish and 2) is unmarried.
Instead, Tony wants to leave the property to his nephew Adam (Jon Hamm), a successful New York banker so spectacularly ill-suited for rural life that he drives up in a Rolls-Royce.
Maybe there’s a universe in which this line of reasoning makes sense, but Wild Mountain Thyme doesn’t find it. Nor can it explain why most of the sets, props, and costumes look like they’re from decades ago, even though references to The Lion King on Broadway suggest we’re somewhere in the vague present. (Its millennial hero uses a landline, and not even the cordless kind.) Or why the characters, who are in their 30s or older, seem to have the emotional maturity and lived experience of middle schoolers. Rosemary, in particular, remains stung by a minor betrayal that occurred between her and Anthony when they were all of eight years old.
No spoilers, but suffice it to say there’s a line of dialogue that had me gasping with disbelief until I felt lightheaded
And we haven’t even gotten to the scene that elevates Wild Mountain Thyme from the ranks of the merely misguided to the spectacularly bizarre. No spoilers, but suffice it to say there’s a line of dialogue that had me gasping with disbelief until I felt lightheaded, and that you will know it when you hear it. It’s so unbelievable and so out of the blue that I wondered, briefly, if the entire film might be one elaborate joke. But if so, no one in the movie is tipping their hand. Blunt, Dornan, and the rest of the cast play their roles completely straight.
Eventually, it all becomes part of Wild Mountain Thyme‘s misshapen charm. A more grounded, more humane film might demand your emotional investment, and maybe end up crushing your heart or pissing you off. A more ostentatiously off-kilter film (like last year’s Cats) might break your brain entirely. But watching Wild Mountain Thyme feels like reading one of those Harry Potter chapters written by a bot, or like watching one of those videos where actors speak gibberish in flawless American accents — it’s familiar and alien all at once. As a romantic drama, it’s total nonsense. But as an escape from reality, you could do worse.
Wild Mountain Thyme is now in theaters and on demand, including on Amazon, Vudu, and more.