A Calm And Reasoned Review of the Wild Mountain Thyme Trailer from an Irish perspective
The trailer for Wild Mountain Thyme has been released, and then pretty much immediately dismantled by everyone in Ireland at once. I made the mistake of watching it to see what was so bad.
It’s hard to do justice to just how awful this looks. The accents are so poor that Christopher Walken is somehow more convincing as an Irishman than Jamie Dornan, even though Jamie Dornan is Northern Irish born and raised. The setting is so insultingly quaint that the reference to freezing eggs is the sole indication that it’s not set in 1953. It even manages to crassly denigrate Americans by assuming that an American so monumentally idiotic as to rent a Rolls-Royce to drive to a remote farm in the world’s muddiest country is also the kind of American who’s doing well enough to afford to rent a Rolls-Royce.
I hesitate to describe this as racism, but it’s very hard not to see it as such. We Irish are lucky enough that negative racism directed at us has largely disappeared, but this crass exoticisation of an imaginary version of Irishness definitely seems rooted firmly in a cheap racial and national stereotype. It even manages to miss out on the handful of stereotypes that still ring true — how do two farms next door to each other belong to families that appear to have had only one child each at a time when condoms were illegal? Why can’t we see a single Irish character in this trailer who has even one trait that isn’t pure stage-Oirishness?
But even if the accents were better, even if the setup was a little truer, this is still a film about Ireland which portrays it as a country of rolling green fields and rural farmers. It’s still a film that pretends that the home of the European HQs of Facebook, Google, AirBNB, Paypal, Twitter, Microsoft and LinkedIn is still all sheep and deserted country roads. It’s still a film that completely ignores the changing ethnic makeup of Irishness, the rapid changes to social and cultural mores over the last thirty years, and the country’s new identity as a global technology and finance hub in order to resell The Field as a cheap and shitty romcom. It’s a film that was made thirty years after The Field was committed to celluloid, and somehow manages to be thirty years behind it.
Maybe the film itself is actually far better than the trailer lets on, and we’re all getting angry about something that’ll turn out pretty well. But I’m not holding my breath.
Lastly: you may feel that the title is inaccurate, and that this is not a calm and reasoned review. To that I say: you should have seen the first draft.
