Why Hollywood gets the Irish so wrong

Romantic comedy Wild Mountain Thyme’s take on Irish life has been mocked ever since its trailer emerged last month. It’s part of a long tradition of stereotyping, writes John Maguire.

Like everyone else in Ireland, last month I watched the newly-launched trailer for Wild Mountain Thyme with my jaw on the floor as a parade of diddly-eye Irish clichés not seen since the dark days of Walt Disney’s 1959 leprechaun fantasy Darby O’Gill and The Little People was crammed into two-and-a-half minutes. Like the diaspora of Irish people living all over the world, my toes curled as dollops of synthetic paddywhackery followed broad cultural stereotype followed borderline national insult. Like anyone who has ever visited Ireland on holiday, or met an Irish person, I rubbed my ears in disbelief as our melodious native accent was mangled beyond recognition once again by an actor playing « Irish ».

John Patrick Shanley’s romantic comedy, shot last year in and around the very real town of Ballina, County Mayo, has Emily Blunt and Jamie Dornan as neighbouring farmers and star-cross’d lovers living in a luridly emerald Ireland scattered with thatched cottages, rocky roads and blow-dried and set livestock. We watch as Dornan’s broth of a boy has a conversation with a nonplussed donkey in a crayon-green field while red-headed colleen Blunt pulls a tartan shawl around her shoulders and dances a jig in her Wellingtons. At one point, a man tumbles into a lake from a coracle (a type of ancient wicker canoe) while someone else genuflects in wonder before a fancy car, suggesting the film might be set some time between the Bronze Age and last St Patrick’s Day. An elderly man in a tweed flat cap sticks his head over a stone wall and cackles toothlessly at the antic goings-on. « I don’t understand you people, » Jon Hamm’s Yank carpetbagger exclaims. Me neither, Jon.

Social media was quick to mock the wobbling Irish accents, with actual Irishman Dornan (from Holywood in County Down, as it happens) singled out for special ridicule. Then Irish-American writer and director John Patrick Shanley, who adapted the film from his own 2014 Broadway play, Outside Mullingar (itself based on summers he had spent with his Irish cousins in the titular midlands town) issued a huffy statement: « If my characters sounded exactly like my Irish relatives spoke, no one would understand them. » The mockery only intensified. « Even we think this is a bit much, » Ireland’s National Leprechaun Museum said in a tweet.

The idea that there is some primordial Irish ‘authenticity’ is a fallacy – Dr Harvey O’Brien

« While remembering it’s not fair to judge a film on its trailer, the accents are all over the place, » admonishes Gerry Grennell, performance and dialogue coach at Dublin’s Bow Street Academy for Screen Acting. « Things aren’t helped by the writing, which is the same ‘faith and begorrah, top o’ the mornin’, may the road rise to meet you’ rubbish that was old hat in the 1940s. It’s pretty dismal. » However Grennell, who has helped Heath Ledger and Johnny Depp polish their respective brogues, still maintains the Irish are too thin-skinned when it comes to non-Irish actors attempting an Irish accent. « We have to get over ourselves, and I include myself in that. Global audiences are not looking at films made in or about Ireland for a perfect rendition of a native accent or an accurate reflection of the country. They’re looking for connections in the story that mirror their own lives, wherever they might be watching from. » They’ll be watching from the US in the first instance, with the Bleeker Street production being released in selected cinemas and on streaming platforms there today – and many of the reviews so far have doubled-down on the advance ridicule. Indiewire’s David Ehrlich says this « soda farl of banter and blarney couldn’t be a broader caricature of Irish culture if it were written by the Keebler elves and directed by a pint of Guinness » while The A.V. Club critic Katie Rife notes that « the characterisations, motivations, dialogue, and acting in this film are all so clumsy and baffling that a bad regional inflection is just one sin among many. »

By John Maguire – BBC Culture