Blarney blossoms more than the titular herb in writer-director John Patrick Shanley’s adaptation of his 2014 play Outside Mullingar. The plot is an exceedingly slender piece of romantic whimsy recounting the protracted emotional journey that a young man and woman on adjacent farms, clearly meant for each other but long kept apart for absurd reasons, must endure before admitting their love in the end.
On the Reilly land, Anthony (Jamie Dornan) lives with his father Tony (Christopher Walken), a cantankerous widower. Across the boundary line Aoife Muldoon (Dearbhla Molloy) has just lost her eccentric husband Chris (Don Wycherley), leaving her alone with their pretty daughter Rosemary (Emily Blunt). There’s a further complication in that Tony sold a small parcel of his family’s land—one that gave him access to the road—to the Muldoons some time ago, requiring the Reillys to open and close a couple of gates in their trips to town.
Eventually Tony will reveal the sappy reason for the sale, which involved his love for wife Mary (originally a Kelly, and played in flashbacks by Claire Barrett). Rosemary has been in love with Anthony since they were kids (played in flashback by Darragh O’Kane and Abigail Coburn), but he once pushed her to the ground, and she has been standoffish ever since. For his part, Anthony sees himself as a bit touched in the head, and so unworthy of her; even Tony thinks his son might be more of a Kelly than a Reilly, and is considering—or so he says—leaving the land to somebody else.
And why is Anthony moseying about, scouring the property with a metal detector? The answer is another part of the extremely sentimental scenario Shanley has concocted. Yet another wrinkle comes with the arrival of Tony’s nephew Adam Kelly (Jon Hamm in a thoroughly thankless role), a well-to-do American who’s interested in acquiring Irish land—and an Irish wife. So he could conceivably become Tony’s heir, and he and Rosemary a match.
There’s some fun to be had in the sheer brazenness of Shanley’s embrace of Irish cliché, and the supporting players provide a good deal of amusing local color. Walken also brings his usual bemused quirkiness to Tony, masticating if not mastering the necessary brogue. But while Blunt and Dornan are an attractive pair, they cannot entirely sell the characters’ peculiarities (or their accents), and poor Hamm seems totally lost at sea. Wild Mountain Thyme may be an ingratiating enough journey to the Emerald Isle for those with a weakness for romantic schmaltz with a Celtic twist, but most viewers will find its shameless manipulation hard to swallow. Optional.