Accents Will Happen

Once put off by poorly executed accents, auditory aficionado Joe Queenan now thoroughly enjoys the stupefyingly creative sounds that actors as varied as Nicolas Cage, Penelope Cruz, Michael Douglas and Brad Pitt have tried to pass off as foreign lilts.

___________________________________________________

Ten years ago I wrote an extremely mean-spirited article for this magazine excoriating various actors and actresses for their bogus ethnic accents. Singled out for particular abuse was Cher, whose plangent whatsmattawityou phrasings in Moonstruck had inflicted "more damage on proud Italian-Americans than a thousand bad Mafia movies. A million bad Mafia movies. 137,876,546 Joe Garagiola commercials. A life's supply of stale cannoli." Or so I felt at the time. Also taking the brunt of my abuse was the doddering ham Laurence Olivier, whose villainously schmaltzy Jewish accent in The Jazz Singer was deemed "an act of unintentional yet nonetheless unforgivable anti-Semitism, virulent beyond all conception."

In ridiculing such faux foreigners as Marlon Brando (The Missouri Breaks, Burn, Mutiny on the Bounty), Barbra Streisand (On a Clear Day You Can See Forever), Mickey Rourke (A Prayer for the Dying) and Jack Nicholson (Prizzi's Honor), I asserted that bad accents "literally take a film prisoner, making it impossible for the viewer to concentrate on anything else." A bad accent was "the cinematic equivalent of a festering Limburger cheese planted on a sumptuous dinner table, making it pointless for the gourmand to try thinking about anything other than that peculiar odor."

Alas, time plays funny tricks on the brain. In the years that have passed since I wrote that vicious and in many ways irresponsible article, I have undergone an odd metamorphosis both as a critic and as a human being. For reasons I do not fully understand, I now _adore _motion pictures that feature one or more characters sporting unwieldy ethnic accents, and no longer feel that these dialectical frills detract from the overall impact of the film--even when the accents are indisputably bad. In fact, now that everybody else has come around to thinking that foreign accents are in and of themselves an occasion for uncontrollable guffawing, I have gone in the complete opposite direction. I now believe that the only reason Americans laugh at foreign accents is because Americans think foreigners are laughable. I do not. Some of my best friends are foreigners. And most of them have ridiculous foreign accents. They are as God made them.

On this matter, my record speaks for itself. I was the first person in New York to see Captain Corelli's Mandolin, and I went specifically to revel in Nicolas Cages happy-go-lucky Italian accent. I was the first person I knew to see America's Sweethearts, and I bought my ticket with the express purpose of feasting on Hank Azaria's over-the-top Frito Bandito delivery. I am the only person I know who paid to see The Wedding Planner, and unlike other spectators who may have been lured to that otherwise unsatisfactory affair by Jennifer Lopez's deft comedic foibles or Matthew McConaughey's quietly understated performance as a duplicitous pediatrician, I was roped in by Justin Chambers's unexpectedly convincing turn as a lovable nitwit with a ripe Neapolitan accent. As we used to say on the street corners of South Philly: "Yo, Justin: Come sta, paisano?"

This is by no means the end of my list. It was John Turturro's gap-toothed, brain-dead, good ole boy droolings, not the Coen brothers' clumsy rustic rehash of The Odyssey, that lured me to O Brother, Where Art Thou? It was Willem Dafoe's macabre Transcarpathian ramblings, supported by John Malkovich's tortured Teutonisms, that induced me to see Shadow of the Vampire. It was the chance to hear Brad Pitt talk like a gypsy pugilist, not Guy Ritchie's film noir sensibilities, that dragged me in the theater that was showing Snatch. The fact is, if you could guarantee me that Sylvester Stallone would adopt a thick Belgian accent in Van Damne Yankees or that Meg Ryan, Diane Keaton and Bette Midler would talk like Bosnian Serbs in For the Boys II, I would go to see those too.

When did this surprising audiovisual conversion take place? I suppose it started five years ago when I saw The Ghost and the Darkness. This is the film in which Val Kilmer plays a results-oriented Irish structural engineer commissioned to build a bridge in the southern Sudan in the late 19th century. Shortly after he arrives in that godforsaken locality, a pair of raffish, unpredictable lions turn up, and quickly begin scarfing down his entire workforce, eventually running the body count to 140 victims. Since it is widely known that male lions do not like to hunt, rarely travel in pairs and never kill humans just for chuckles, no one can figure out why these maverick felines are behaving in such a cruel yet idiosyncratic fashion.

Then, about halfway through the movie, Michael Douglas turns up in the role of Remington, a mysterious big-game hunter and all-purpose reprobate whose family was wiped out during the War Between the States. Douglas, grizzled, ornery and strange, comes loaded for bear, with a complete arsenal of state-of-the-art firearms, an entire tribe of Masai lion hunters, and the kind of balls-up, in-your-face attitude you can only acquire on the fields of Shiloh, Antietam and Chickamauga after fighting on the losing side. But what really makes Douglas such an arresting figure is his amazing drawl. Fusing his native Southern California good vibrations with a postmenopausal Dixie melody, Douglas concocts a hybrid Gettysburg del Mar twang so annoying it literally drives the marauding lions insane, luring one of them to his death.

Shortly after Douglas has been ripped to shreds by the lone surviving king of the beasts, Kilmer finally realizes that his own bellicose Irish accent may have contributed to the horrible tragedy that has befallen his colleague. Indeed, it is only by mouthing the words "I'm gonna sort it out" with a lilting brogue last heard in the mists of Glendalough when the Rose of Tralee was in full bloom that Kilmer finally succeeds in taunting the lone remaining predator out into the open where he can get a good shot at it.

The Ghost and the Darkness was the first movie I ever saw where accents were used as a force to improve the human condition. Not only did the accents help kill the lions, they actually made the movie better. Without the uproarious vocalizations supplied by Kilmer and Douglas, The Ghost and the Darkness would have been your standard man-against-the elements tripe, about as interesting as The Edge or Arachnophobia. But by introducing these flamboyant inflections, the actors seriously raised the ante. By brandishing their perplexing and, in some ways, alarming accents, Kilmer and Douglas elevated the film to the rarefied heights of Sub-Saharan camp. I can think of no higher praise for an actor.

Pages: 1 2 3