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Nomadland may have won three Oscars; three big ones, no less – Best Picture, Best Director for Chloé Zhao and Best Actress for its star, Frances McDormand. But all over Britain this week there are going to be living-room conversations beginning with a little sigh and the words: ‘Do you want to give this much longer?’
For like so many Oscar nominees this year – Minari, Sound Of Metal, Judas And The Black Messiah – this is very much an arthouse picture rather than a commercial film.
Yes, the story of a 60-something woman travelling the bleak but photogenic western states in the battered van in which she lives is beautiful to look at. McDormand is quietly fab as Fern, and Zhao does have interesting things to say not just about America’s economic present but its economic past too.
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Dir: John Patrick Shanley. Starring: Emily Blunt, Jamie Dornan, Jon Hamm, Dearbhla Molloy, Christopher Walken. Cert 12A, 102 mins
When it comes to
Cats, the worry isn’t that revealing the ending might spoil the fun. It’s that no sensible soul would ever believe it in the first place. Once this feature-length ad for Ireland – if someone’s concept of Ireland were surmised entirely from St Patrick’s Day specials on QVC – reaches its big twist, the whole film starts to feel like an elaborate prank. Is John Patrick Shanley, the Oscar and Pulitzer prize-winning director behind this alleged romcom, simply sitting back and cackling at all our befuddlement?
Jamie Dornan and Emily Blunt behave like no human beings you have ever met
Credit: Alamy
Dir: John Patrick Shanley. Starring: Jamie Dornan, Emily Blunt, Christopher Walken, Jon Hamm, Lydia McGuinness, Danielle Ryan. 12A cert, 104 mins
For all those who groused that this year’s Oscar titles were too weighty and severe for their own good, here is the antidote: a film so frivolous and twee I felt as if my brain were leaking out of my nostrils as I watched.
Expanded by John Patrick Shanley from his 2014 play Outside Mullingar, Wild Mountain Thyme is a romantic comedy about a man and a woman who were raised on neighbouring farms somewhere inside an advert for the Irish Tourist Board, in which the green in every field and hillside has been cranked up to a queasy hue.
11 Dec 2020
On 11 November 2020, the National Leprechaun Museum, the keepers of the flame of whimsical Irish mythology and gentle storytelling, tweeted after watching the trailer for
Wild Mountain Thyme: “Even we think this is a bit much.” They’re not wrong. John Patrick Shanley’s woefully misjudged romantic drama, based on his play
Outside Mullingar, is more Irish than Bono drawing a four-leaf clover into a pint of Guinness, so full of rural quirk, magical enchantment and oversaturated tweeness it makes
Hunger. The cast, especially Emily Blunt and Jon Hamm, do their best to breathe real life into the fanciful proceedings, but it is let down by easy stereotypes, a botched tone, a distant relationship to authenticity and one truly brain-melting storytelling decision.
This article reveals a major plot twist spoiler.
We expect a cute rom-com in “Wild Mountain Thyme,” delivered to us by the capable hands of Emily Blunt, Jamie Dornan, and Christopher Walken. It has the aroma of a classic until we get stuck half an hour through in a plot that drips along as slow as honey and packs an even stickier aftereffect.
The late 2020 release created a sensation in the entertainment industry for its deliberately slow speed and its dramatic plot twist. The film intentionally slaps us in the face with crude accents, miscellaneous anachronisms, and an interpretation of love and identity that leaves many reviewers harboring harsh critiques.