(Janeen Damian, 2024)

Irish Wish is a romantic comedy directed by Janeen Damian and produced by Michael Damian. It tells the story of American writer Maddie Kelly (Lindsay Lohan) who has recently edited the successful book Two Irish Hearts by Irish author Paul Kennedy (Alexander Vlahos). Maddie is secretly in love with Paul but before she has the chance to tell him, he meets and falls for her best friend Emma (Elizabeth Tan). A few months later, Emma and Paul are getting married in Paul’s extravagant Irish home (set in Killruddery House, Co Wicklow). Maddie is dejected as she flies into Knock Airport to attend the wedding. At the airport, she meets James Thomas (Ed Speleers) in a typical “meet-cute” scenario when she mistakes his suitcase for her own. James is an English wildlife photographer who has an affinity with Ireland where he is a frequent visitor.

Staying in Kennedy House reminds Maddie of all that she has missed out on by not informing Paul of her feelings for him. On a trip to Lough Tay, Maddie inadvertently makes a wish on a wishing chair that summons Saint Brigid (Dawn Bradfield). The Saint grants Maddie’s wish and the narrative situation is magically reversed. Now Maddie, and not Emma, is days away from marrying Paul. Brigid further manipulates events so that James is hired as the wedding photographer. James and Maddie take a road trip to scout out wedding locations for photo backdrops, and among other (diegetically and extra-diegetically) judiciously selected Irish landscapes are the popular Cliffs of Moher. The couple becomes closer and, as a result of bad weather (also provoked by Saint Brigid), the two end up at a lively pub session surrounded by those popular elixirs of love: traditional Irish music, dancing and darts. Maddie soon realises that James is her true match and Paul is only using her for her writing talents, to cover up for his own lack of professional inventiveness. She asks Saint Brigid to reverse her wish, and the national Patron Saint obliges.

Irish Wish is the most recent in a succession of American romantic comedies set in Ireland, including: The Matchmaker (1997); P.S. I Love You (2007); Leap Year (2010); Honeymoon for One (2011); Finding You (2020); and As Luck Would Have It (2021). The films vary in their plots but they all centre on an American woman who travels to Ireland, meets a man and, in doing so, connects with Irish culture and the Irish landscape in a way that changes her life profoundly. Purportedly, liberation from her life and professional responsibilities back home and into the utopian Emerald Isle gives her an entirely different perspective on things. The narrative conceit – most famously executed in John Ford’s classic The Quiet Man, but a recurrent one in many “Irish”-American films – both extrapolates from and bestows upon Ireland and Irish culture a mystical transformative quality. Thus framed, not only is Ireland “othered” safely in a specific way, but its depiction as fey and uncomplicated also confirms the attraction to audiences of a trope that has been historically well established. Standing at the point of cultural connection between the female lead and her experience of the country, and effectively positioned as the “cultural translator”, is the romantic male character who is either Irish or very familiar with the eccentricities of the place. In fidelity to the rom-com genre, he typically challenges the ingénue to reimagine her outlook or value system with his personality and behaviour (both of which are opposed to her disposition), or through his lifestyle (which contrasts favourably with hers). Options for the depiction of the character types are limited: the female is generally uptight and career-driven, whereas the male is more carefree and has an affinity with nature. Thus positioned, he manifests as an extension of Ireland’s very identity. The trajectories of the plots are determined rigidly: as the American female characters become more comfortable within their new circumstances – explicitly marking a correction to a problematic value system and life philosophy (nothing short of a Pauline conversion) – the romance between the pair blossoms.

In many of these films, the forced voyage of self-discovery onto which the female character is seduced is literalised in either a set-piece sequence of landscape exploration or a trip extended across a considerable part of the narrative. In both instances, the male acts as a geographical guide for the woman and eventually becomes a more spiritual, philosophical or emotional leader in her life. In Leap Year, Declan (Matthew Goode) agrees to drive Anna (Amy Adams) to Dublin from Kerry; in Finding You, Beckett (Jedidiah Goodacre) drives Finley (Rose Reid) around Ireland to see the sites; in As Luck Would Have It, Brennan (Allen Leech) drives Lindsey (JoAnna Garcia Swisher) to Glendalough to trace her grandmother’s origins; and in Irish Wish, James drives Maddie around to explore photo opportunities for her wedding. Chaperoned by their male hosts, the women are protected in a landscape which they usually misperceive as amicable and safe. Their characteristic strength, leadership and self-determination which they imported from the cut-and-thrust world of America blinds them to the potential dangers and hostility of the Irish landscape, so they must be disempowered of their agency for their own good and survival. This requirement is established early in many of these films and marked by the females’ clumsiness or confusion. In both Irish Wish and Honeymoon for One, Maddie and Eve lose their luggage on arrival in Ireland; mishaps that (conveniently) leave them ill-equipped to deal with their new surroundings. Eve breaks a heel while walking down a country road and later falls into a river. In Leap Year, Anna’s luggage is temporarily stolen and she struggles in her high heels when she steps into cow excrement and falls down a muddy hill. The fact that each female is driven by her male counterpart evidently infantilises her agency by underscoring a curtailing of her independence. This is conveyed as being a necessary part of the woman’s personal transformation – desired or not – and the ubiquitous appearance of the Irish landscape creates an appropriate mise en scène of mystique that mutes the political implications of character development. In this way, Ireland is associated with traditional gender values and kept in the past.

The fatalistic inevitability of the romantic match – of both female outsider to local man (or expert) and of the American to the Irish environment – is often obliquely hinted. Lindsay Lohan’s long red hair is repeatedly framed against the backdrop of the Irish landscape linking Maddie with her surroundings and traditional depictions of Irish women. Other red-haired women make up the leads of Leap Year (Amy Adams) and As Luck Would Have It (JoAnna Garcia Swisher). This reference need not be directly to Maureen O’Hara in The Quiet Man (1952), but even Mary Kate was set within a well-established historical visual depiction of the authentic Irish colleen.

The character of Saint Brigid – with her middle-aged bohemian style and head scarf – appears to represent a new version of Ireland that champions female empowerment and diversity of faiths; the latter because Saint Brigid has been interpreted historically in different ways as both a Celtic goddess and a Christian saint. However, within this film she becomes a manifest surrogate for the stereotypical supernatural, mythical or folkloric characters that have traditionally populated the Irish landscape. The troublesome leprechaun figure of past Irish-American narratives such as Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959) is perhaps the most commonly recurring incarnation of the phenomenon. Eschewing any sanctity, the modernised Brigid is meddlesome and wily; her odd mystical influence ironically marked on the bus that transports Maddie and James from Knock Airport (which is labelled “Brigid’s Signature Tours”).

Lough Tay is used as a key location in Irish Wish. It is here that Maddie makes the eponymous supplication on a strange wishing chair. This integration of the impossible, mystical and the concrete presence of the Irish landscape becomes a recurring stylistic device within the narrative. During the promotion of the film, the filmmakers were keen to repeat how magical they found the process of filming the Irish landscape (see YouTube interviews Popternative 2024; Beautiful Ballad 2024; The Locher Room 2024). The spiritualistic use of the Lough backdrop, here, is evidence of a persistent supernatural and mystical connotation in spite of Tay’s imagined destruction in Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy (1997). Emer and Kevin Rockett points to its significance when they remind us how Martin McLoone described Jordan’s visual explosion – and deconstruction of established cinematic shorthand for the rural Irish idyll – as “one of the most subversive images within Irish cinema. In that single moment, the dominant representation of the Irish landscape is destroyed and its mythic and constructed nature revealed” (2003: 192). However, the location has returned, with spectral and supernatural perseverance marking both the longevity and character of Ireland’s imagined identity in the American mind. Scenic shots in (predominantly American) generic cinema, such as those depicting Lough Tay, are frequently confined to reductive, one-dimensional versions of the country as perpetually undisturbed and unchanged by time. While Jordan has already deliberately and violently overturned this visualisation, almost thirty years after The Butcher Boy the enigmatic landscape is still the dominant image of Ireland onscreen used to uphold impossible and superimposed idealisations about the country. Much of Irish cinema aims to portray an authentic and self-aware contemporary Ireland, yet films like Irish Wish repress aspects of Ireland’s modernisation in favour of safer depictions of rural simplicity and timelessness. Irish Wish constructs a version of Ireland manifestly in contrast to big city America to establish the Emerald Isle as a viable site of transformation and purification, and as a location that upholds traditional ideals around male and female roles. In this way, Irish Wish and other films like it continue to expose a latent conservative American desire for an idealised and traditional Ireland, perhaps as much as contemporary political thinking in the United States reveals a similar desire to repossess an idealised and traditional America.