Against all odds, I got duped by one of those online phishing schemes on Monday. A fake NBA.com store was advertising Kobe Bryant jerseys for 70% off, which struck me as a deal so monumental that I just had to purchase one on my phone while in the bathroom. Usually, I’m at my sharpest in the loo, but in this case, I was another sucker ripe for exploitation. I gave them my credit card information, my home and email address, and even my middle name. It took me no more than two minutes from the time I hit the Submit button to realize my grievous error. In short, I am quite gullible. I’m a rube. A dullard. A mark. A big dumb-dumb. I clearly have no common sense when a deep discount is involved.
I say all of this so that you understand that when I tell you how horrible most movie accents are and how I cannot ever be duped into believing them, I’m not posturing. I’m usually a bit of a dope, but when Will Smith gets his hands on an African accent, I’m calling BS from the start.
In the recent film Concussion, Big Willie Style plays Dr Bennet Omalu, the man who discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a brain disease we now know to be common in professional football players. Dr Omalu is from Nigeria, which posed a bit of a dilemma for Smith. He had two choices: bail on the accent and be labeled inauthentic to the man he was portraying, or attempt to mimic his subject and risk utter humiliation.
Choice number one is what I like to call Costnering because Kevin Costner never does accents in his films as a rule. Every character he plays sounds like Kevin Costner, moves like Kevin Costner, and believes in the inherent goodness of the human spirit like Kevin Costner. In the most famous instance of Costnering, 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Costner plays the titular English hero who robs from the rich and gives to the poor with the most corn-fed American accent outside of an Oregon wildlife refuge. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves has mostly been forgotten, save for its lead actor’s seeming lack of interest in acting.
Smith chose door number two and mostly failed to distract me from the artifice he presented to filmgoers. The real Dr Omalu has a throaty, froggy voice, which Smith doesn’t even try to put forth in his performance. Instead, he offers a pan-African slurry that sounds a bit like an In Living Color sketch gone wrong. When Smith as Dr Omalu screams, “Tell da troof!” in the trailer, your heart is supposed to soar at the mere thought of such a noble figure standing up for what’s right against the evil NFL. I actually laughed through the rest of the trailer, then ran around my house saying “Tell da troof!” until I tripped on a throw rug.
An actor with a talent for mimicry might have pulled this off, but the producers of Concussion didn’t cast that person. They cast Will Smith, he of Seven Pounds and Hancock. It’s as if his voice went through one of those novelty masks at Toys ‘R’ Us, except this one isn’t for Darth Vader, it’s for Desmond Tutu.
Yes, I know that Desmond Tutu is from South Africa, not Nigeria. That’s how bad Smith’s accent is in Concussion. But it’s not even the most egregious instance of vocal mangling at the cinema this season. Earlier this year, Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton, Dakota Johnson and a cast of hundreds competed for the Jack Nicholson Memorial Worst Boston Accent Championship in Black Mass. Over the summer, Jude Law went American for a supporting role in Spy. But the worst of them all was yet to come.
The Revenant review – gut-churningly brutal, beautiful storytellingRead more
Last weekend, I treated myself to the mud-caked mayhem of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant, a motion picture that is clearly quite proud of its own attention to period detail. At first glance, everything seems to be in order. There’s racism, greed, foul language, dirt everywhere, unrepentant violence, cruelty and lots of people wearing fur pelts. It’s a real-life Oregon Trail where in lieu of contracting dysentery, Leonardo DiCaprio is mauled by a mama grizzly bear, which might qualify as the best role for a woman in the entire film. What ruins the illusion for me is the presence of Kevin Costner’s polar opposite. There is one man in Hollywood today who is infamous for his lack of ability to control his own desire to butcher dialects, accents, and really the English language as a whole: Tom Hardy.
I first saw Hardy in the 2002 film Star Trek: Nemesis. In that movie, he plays a clone of the USS Enterprise’s Captain Picard. Picard is, of course, portrayed by Patrick Stewart, an actor with a clear, forceful, Shakespearean voice that lends gravitas to even the most nonsensical dialogue about shield modulation and warp factors. Hardy as faux-Picard speaks through gritted teeth over the entire runtime of the movie. I could have sworn he suffered from lockjaw while orating about his ambition to blow up the Earth with his giant laser for two hours. I thought, “Who is this clown and why can’t he speak? Surely this will be his last movie until someone named Donald Trump actually blows up the Earth with a real giant laser some time in the year 2017.”
Nope. Hardy’s career wasn’t sunk by his shambolic appearance in a less than stellar Star Trek film. In fact, he’s ascended to heights of acclaim in his chosen profession since 2002. I should say here that his success is well deserved. Hardy is a fine actor (outside of the Star Trek franchise). It’s just that I can’t understand a bloody word he says sometimes because he delights in coming up with funny voices that try the audience’s patience. Watch Mad Max: Fury Road again and you’ll notice that the little dialogue Hardy has is often dubbed in post – the words spoken don’t quite match up with the movement of his prodigious lips. This isn’t really a problem for the other actors either. Just Tom. Also, he slips in and out of an Australian accent on a whim, I guess because Max was established as being Australian. He was also established as being Mel Gibson, but Hardy wasn’t going to pull that one off and I doubt he even wanted to.
In The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan put a gas mask on Hardy’s face which saved them the trouble of having to loop his dialogue. Still, the most memorable part of that film is Bane’s ridiculous accent, which sounded like James Mason being drowned in the Mediterranean. Hardy plays Bane as a posh Baby Huey with a Mussolini complex. It’s difficult enough to accept the reality of a movie where a guy with a jockstrap on his face steals a nuclear bomb and fights a man in an S&M outfit in the middle of a snowstorm. When the guy with the jockstrap face has the voice of Richard Burton eating shards of glass in a mine shaft, you might as well fling your Blu-Ray disc out the window and go read a book.
This brings me back to The Revenant. What’s more real than this movie? That’s real mud they’re rolling around in! Leo ate a real liver! The DP shot with nothing but natural light! Crew members got real hypothermia! The word verisimilitude was invented for this movie! Hold on, though. Here comes Tom Hardy with another funny voice to derail the whole picture.
Hardy plays John Fitzgerald, a dastardly character that Leo’s virtuous Hugh Glass must thwart in the movie’s climax. Fitzgerald is supposed to be from the south or some other rural area and has plans to go back to Texas to re-enlist in the army once he receives a fat payday. This affords Hardy the chance to sink his teeth into yet another dialect and boy, does he chew away at that thing. Again, Hardy’s accent seems to ride in and out on the wind, appearing when necessary and getting usurped by a generic, Star Trek: Nemesis-esque growl when he can get away with it. At times, I have an easier go at believing in the CGI bear than I do his peculiar marble-mouth voice. Still, I find myself captivated anyway. Sometimes a clever forgery can catch you at the right time – like, on the toilet and glued to your cellphone perhaps.
Hardy is a man somewhere in between the chameleonic skills of actors like Daniel Day-Lewis and the intractable movie star personas of Will Smith and Kevin Costner. I’d certainly rather have actors like Hardy trying and failing to make me believe than the apathy of Costner-ing because every so often I can be fooled, either by a can’t-miss deal on basketball jerseys or a corny accent. You might as well go fishing and hope for the best.
