Accents Will Happen

From that point onward, I could never think of accents in quite the same way. Seeing--or rather, hearing--Kilmer and Douglas in The Ghost and the Darkness persuaded me to totally reassess my attitude toward ethnic or regional intonations. What I finally decided was that it didn't matter whether an accent was convincing or not; all that mattered was that the movie star put his heart and soul into his throat so that his accent became the central element in the film. It was nothing to be ashamed of if your accent was a complete and utter failure; posterity would forgive you for that. All that mattered was that you gave it a shot. All that mattered was that you swung for the fences. All that mattered was that you went for it.

Consider the case of Brad Pitt, who has bequeathed mankind two of the most remarkable accents in the history of motion pictures. In The Devil's Own, Pitt plays a likable mass murderer who has come to the United States seeking to buy inexpensive Stinger missiles, which he hopes will further the cause of the Irish Republican Army. The negotiations soon go awry because absolutely nobody in the movie--not Harrison Ford, not Treat Williams, and certainly not Ruben Blades--can make hide or hair out of what he's saying. Pronouncing every syllable with a lugubrious intensity and monochromatic uniformity not heard since the Fighting Prince of Donegal breathed his last in the Black Vale of Killarney, Pitt goes through the entire movie without saying a single word that anyone else can understand.

I do not know whether Pitt was deliberately taking this approach in order to accentuate the fundamental inability to communicate that has afflicted the warring parties on the Emerald Isle for generations, or whether his speech coach was a bum, but one thing I do know is: Generations from now, people of Irish descent will still be talking about Pitt's daunting accent in this movie--and some may actually be emulating it. Meaning that no one will be able to understand what they are saying, either. Faith _and _begorrah.

This brings me to a second major point: Actors who use preposterous accents tend to give better performances in these movies than in films where they speak with natural deliveries. Pitt was unspectacular in Meet Joe Black, The Mexican and Sleepers, but was fantastic in Snatch, The Devil's Own and Kalifornia, all of which required extensive verbal retrofitting. Justin Chambers gave an endearing little performance as the jilted Italian boyfriend in The Wedding Planner, but was totally useless in The Musketeer, where a French accent would have diverted the audience's attention away from his shortness. And Nicolas Cage has never been more convincing as a romantic lead than he was in Captain Corelli's Mandolin. Mouthing phrases like "Bella bambina at two o'clock," Cage was able to show a warm, sensitive side, in marked contrast to the trademark tongue-in-cheek performances he has given in most of his films.

But for me, the actor who truly closes the deal is Robin Williams. Mind you, I am not the sort of person who liberally doles out praise to the likes of Robin Williams. But shortly before he became the insanely annoying person he is today, Williams made Moscow on the Hudson, a motion picture replete with some of the best foreign accent work ever. In this film, Williams was cunning enough to speak Russian throughout the early sequences in the movie, laying the groundwork for the remainder of the film, in which he speaks broken English. I have no way of knowing whether Williams's Russian is good, bad or indifferent, but by establishing himself as a native Russian speaker early in the proceedings, Williams creates the powerful illusion that he might actually be Russian. This clever ploy helped camouflage the fact that he was actually an American playing the same character he had played in a dozen other films, and is still playing to this day--the jerk-off with a heart of gold.

In discussing heavily accented movies, I do not want to create the impression that I am indiscriminately drawn to all movies featuring ethnics, nor that all accents are equally good. No one is ever going to surpass Meryl Streep's Iowataliana accent in The Bridges of Madison County, the only Neapolitan cadence in the history of motion pictures that can be described as "under the top." Whereas Nick Nolte goes completely overboard with his moon-hits-your-eye-like-a-big-pizza-pie pastafazooling in Lorenzo's Oil--as do Jack Nicholson in Prizzi's Honor and Cher in Moonstruck--Streep deliberately underplays her accent, concentrating on affecting a gently out-of-kilter inflection, where the emphasis on specific words is just slightly off base. This is the way people who learn a second language as adults almost always speak. It's not the accent that gives them away. It's where they place the stress on individual syllables. Their cadences are always wrong.

But Streep, who has displayed a subtle mastery of accents in films as varied as Sophie's Choice, A Cry in the Dark and The French Lieutenant's Woman, is one of a kind. Other actors who have tried to underplay foreign accents have failed miserably. In Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Kevin Costner lost his nerve and got stuck somewhere between English and American. An even worse fate befell Aidan Quinn in Michael Collins, where he was trapped between Liam Neeson, who is actually Irish, Alan Rickman, who sounds Irish, and Julia Roberts, who delivered an accent so pusillanimously Celtic that it is now referred to by linguists and ethnographers as The Full Meghan.

By contrast, Quinn meekly settled for the kind of half-hearted, quasi-Irish-American accent that you hear in half-filled bars in Yonkers, New York, on Saturday night when T. J. McGillicuddy and the Roving Paddywhackers perform a winsome selection of Hibernian chestnuts.

The important thing to remember about using an accent is that if the actor does not truly believe in it, the audience will not believe in it either. An accent must not only be embraced; it must be flaunted. It must never be an ornament; it must become a second skin. Think of Jon Voight as a deranged Paraguayan snake hunter in Anaconda, literally eating the scenery, which just happens to be the entire Amazon jungle. Think of Richard Gere as a congenial, top-o'-the-mornin'-to-ya terrorist in The Jackal. Think of Frances McDormand as a loopy Norwegian-American police officer in Fargo. Think of Hank Azaria as a lisping caballero in America's Sweethearts. But mostly, think of Brad Pitt as a gypsy prizefighter in Snatch, where it is not only a case of his being completely incomprehensible to the audience, but of his being completely incomprehensible to the other people in the film.

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