Leap Year (2010)

Leap Year arrives from 2010 with the confidence of a film that believes it has found a novel premise: an American woman flies to Ireland to exploit a folk tradition permitting women to propose on February 29. Anna Brady, played by Amy Adams, is a Boston real estate stager who cannot extract a ring from her cardiologist boyfriend. The tradition functions as a gentle inversion of courtship protocol, and it is the only gender-role negotiation the screenplay is willing to entertain. The heroine still spends the running time pursuing a man across a damp countryside, and the reward remains a wedding. The Irish Times called the picture reactionary. That verdict holds up.

What follows is a road trip assembled from weather delays, ruined shoes, and a stolen suitcase. Declan O'Callaghan, the surly publican, agrees to drive Anna to Dublin for five hundred euro because his establishment faces foreclosure. The debt subplot gestures at community solidarity and the indifference of banks, though the film's interest in economics extends no further than a collection tin passed around a bar. Her romantic rival, Jeremy, proposes only because a co-op board prefers married applicants. Money and property intrude on love, briefly, and then depart without further comment.

The cast is uniformly white, the humor leans on shamrocks and accents, and no social question is raised that a montage cannot settle. There is no racial reckoning, no environmental sermon, no meditation on body image or neurodivergence. The film wants only to deliver two attractive people into each other's arms beside a cliff. Amy Adams remains winning. The film around her remains a Shamrock Shake, artificially sweet and authentically Gaelic in roughly the way a greeting card is authentic. Its cultural awareness is thin, its lecture energy absent, and its ambitions modest. We classify it accordingly and move on to the next vintage.