That Wild Mountain Thyme makes little logistical or temporal sense is not unique or even imperiling for a romantic comedy, which can spin gold out of straw scaffolding with the gift of charm, chemistry or the basic intrigue of will-they, won’t-they hijinks. Anthony and Rosemary are allegedly in their mid-to-late 30s, yet there’s no indication of a romantic history or even life before the first scene (were they friends growing up? Teenage lovers? Did they live as neighbors for decades and just … not speak?) Rosemary has barely left her farm in western Ireland yet impulsively and seamlessly pulls off a two-day round trip to New York City to see a flirtatious Adam, and the most fazing event is the emotional resonance of the Swan Lake ballet. The story is ostensibly set in the present day, yet no character uses a cellphone or the internet. Shanley, who won a best screenplay Oscar for Moonstruck, and a Pulitzer and Tony for his 2004 play Doubt: A Parable, has penned a confusingly shallow script that brings the play’s emotional thinness and anachronisms into distracting, confounding focus. Many of the film’s issues probably derive from its source material, which marked Debra Messing’s Broadway debut (with her own appalling Irish accent) as Rosemary and opened to tepidly mixed reviews – the Hollywood Reporter praised the play’s “emotional generosity”, while the Irish Times deemed the work “mystifyingly awful”.
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