This bucolic romance, co-starring bashful Jamie Dornan, is awash with whimsy, wonder – and laughable accents
There’s a sublime awfulness and condescension to this
American vision of
Ireland, adapted by writer-director John Patrick Shanley from his Broadway stage hit: a mind-boggling stew of bizarre paddywhackery that makes John Ford’s The Quiet Man look like a documentary about crack dealers. Two of its stars, Emily Blunt and Christopher Walken – both playing
Irish people – engage in a colossal intergenerational battle for who can do the worst Irish accent. Blunt and Walken’s brogue-off makes this the King Kong v Godzilla event of inauthentic Irish voices.
It’s supposed to be happening in the present day, but it might as well be happening in 1958. Blunt plays Rosemary, a beautiful, sharp-tongued farmer’s daughter in County Westmeath, and isn’t she in love with the soft eejit from the farm next door? The first time we see her, she is actually smoking a pipe, although the presumed “joke” status of that moment is undermined by the keynote of syrupy-poetic whimsy that dominates the rest of the movie.