Aubrey MaloneDare to be Wild (PG)
This biopic of the Irish landscape designer Mary Reynolds, who won a gold medal at the 2002 Chelsea Flower Show, is as much a throwback to the rose-tinted depiction of Ireland – or should I say Oirland, we were force-fed in the era of films like The Quiet Man. You watch it thinking that if Maureen O’Hara were a young woman today she’d have been a shoo-in for the main role.
It’s played instead by Emma Greenwell. Her bubbly earnestness makes her easy on the eye but the lines she’s given to speak (like the bland bumper stickers about realising your dreams that you get in Christmas crackers) are embarrassingly ethereal.
The same could be said of her colleague and lover Christy Collard (Tom Hughes), a British botanist with ambitions to irrigate the deserts of Ethiopia. Mary follows him out there to help him in his resolve but the film’s treatment of Africa is as stoutly sanitised as that of Ireland.
‘Dublin, Ireland’ appears as a subtitle in an early scene. I immediately thought, here we go, this is going to be a product designed for the foreign market. So, alas, it turned out to be. But doesn’t it patronise foreigners to expect them to believe we’re still locked in this glorified stage-Irishry of ecological platitudes?
What a pity, too, that the Irish Film Board, who bankrolled the film with Green Earth, have thrown a heap of money at it when there are so many great writers out there vainly putting out the begging bowl for infinitely more deserving projects.
Ms Reynolds is undoubtedly very good at landscaping but Vivienne de Courcy, directing, portrays her as a kind of Christina Noble figure rather than someone who threw a few rocks together and surrounded them with a pool and a hawthorn tree.
Every scene, every character, is coated over with a plastic sheen of fatuousness. That includes the effete eco-warriors and the would-be reconstructed hippies.
After a while I found my only enjoyment was spotting some subsidiary member of the cast and going, ‘Oh, there’s yer man from Glenroe’. When the DVD comes out I would suggest it be supplemented with leprechauns, some Walter Hinde postcards of Glendalough and maybe a bonus feature of a little bottle of Tipperary Spring Water.
We’re asked to believe that Mary saved the world with her creativity. As I listened to this rarefied gobbledygook I was trying to save my sanity. The film might have made a vaguely interesting 30-minute documentary on something like Scannal but no way does it deserve the full-scale motion picture treatment, especially considering the near-sanctification of its subject. All we’re missing is a soundtrack by Enya.
Mary tells us she wants to recapture the mystical open spaces and put them in our Celtic Sanctuaries. She says she wants to preserve wildness and avoid the cosmetic. But I’m afraid Dare to Be Wild isn’t wild at all.
What is it? Cosmetic.
Poor *