It’s March! The month dedicated to celebrating everything Irish! There is no better way to pay tribute to the great green nation than with the release of another film that depicts life in Ireland with extreme accuracy. Ahead of the Lindsay Lohan’s new movie Irish Wish hitting Netflix on March 15, here is a list that chronicles the true origins of Ireland as a country. Please feel free to use this as a tourist’s guide.
The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952)
Ireland’s mythical origin story. Before this film, the island just existed as a foggy outpost that appeared every seven years. Afterwards, it manifested as a permanent physical reminder of the good old days when you could drag your wife across a field, followed by the entire village, and she would thank you for it. The Irish romcom industrial complex officially begins here. The Quiet Man gave us the prototype that is still closely replicated today: fiery redheads that can’t be tamed, kissing in the rain because Irish weather is itself a character, and taming the untamable redhead and marrying her in order to secure land (everyone is always caught up in land disputes). As an Irish redhead, I can confirm this is true to this day AND I WILL NOT BE TAMED!
Far and Away (Ron Howard, 1992)
Set in 1892, but honestly that doesn’t matter, time doesn’t exist in Ireland. It is in a constant state of Ye Olden Times no matter what is happening. It is also the ideal stage on which to perform masculinity. Everyone in Ireland is always fighting, bare-knuckled with cartoonish sound effects (a noise that genuinely does happen every time you punch someone, due to the natural air pressure of the land—that’s a true fact). In Far and Away, Shannon (Nicole Kidman) lives out a classic fantasy of falling under the spell of brutish Irish peasant Joseph (believably played by Tom Cruise) and leaves all her colonial wealth behind to live a simpler life with him. An opportunity available to all visitors.
The people of Ireland live in mud and oppression but the cause of it is irrelevant, it is a land devoid of political context. The oppression just exists to make everyone a believable underdog. Why is Shannon rich? Who is evicting Joseph and torching his land? That’s irrelevant. Look at how green everything is.
P.S. I Love You (Richard LaGravenese, 2007)
The main lesson to take from this film is that all the accents are correct. Everyone sounds like Gerard Butler and Jeffrey Dean Morgan because it is a made-up island filled with made-up accents. In fact, Hillary Swank’s Holly shows us that not only is this an accent, but it’s also its own language when Butler shouts, “Kiss me arse” and she screams “Stop being bilingual” back at him. We are a land of many tongues.
If you are planning a trip to scenic but unspecified Ireland, in accordance with P.S I Love You, you are entitled to fall in love with a tall, handsome, and charming man who will serenade you in a pub with “an American song about a local girl” (it’s “Galway Girl”). To be rescued from the middle of a lake by a rugged fisherman. To wander into any farmland you wish and watch farmers heave bales of hay from one spot to another with no real purpose. Most importantly, this will all be the same person because there are exactly five men in Ireland and four of them are priests.
Leap Year (Anand Tucker, 2010)
Leap Year depicts the Irish landscape with accurate precision. Amy Adams’ Anna shows us that as an island, it is entirely possible to walk from one side of the country to the other. It’s the walkable community dream of all landlocked Americans. With the lack of place names in this film and nothing in between the very green fields and Dublin, it is very easy to decipher Ireland’s geography: A Field or The (one) City.
One of Ireland’s main purposes is to be a rugged landscape that reflects the turbulent emotions of the lovelorn tourists that visit. Are you conflicted about whether you should marry your cardiac surgeon boyfriend or leave him for a brooding Irish man with no emotional communication skills but who can throw a good punch? Feel free to run through the rain in your high heels to the Cliffs of Moher and ponder this impossible decision. It’s what they’re there for.
Wild Mountain Thyme (John Patrick Shanley, 2020)
Finally, we have the modern classic that hits all the marks. A film that combines everything we’ve learned from the previous films and confirms it all to be true. If you come to Ireland, you will kiss a rogue Irish man in the rain and you both will be inexplicably covered in mud. It also encapsulates the timelessness of Ireland perfectly with Anthony Reilly (Jamie Dornan) fishing in a river while sitting in some kind of woven wicker boat. Very 6,000 years ago.
An entire nation trapped in amber and immune to any kind of social development (except for the technology for Rosemary Muldoon to freeze her eggs so a son can eventually be born to inherit the family farm), there is really nothing else to do other than tell stories, fall into mud, and yearn. This film is proof that the people who have settled on the island only meant to market romcoms are noble savages who only aspire to argue about who owns what land and then never leave it.
Ireland is a small, terminally nostalgic slice of what America was before industrialization and land grabs (but not before colonization). It’s nice to take a primitive holiday into what once was, then leave and return to comfortable modernity where no one has mud on their face all the time and the internet exists.