Why nothing at the movies beats a really bad accent
‘House of Gucci’ is already notorious for its cast’s various bids at sounding Italian – but, says Tim Robey, they merely add to the fun
TIn ‘The Hunt for Red October’, Connery suggested only the remotest familiarity with Mother Russia
his week, the cast of Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci prove that picking an Italian accent is like ordering off a menu. You can opt for the all-out, wildly indulgent pasta dish (Lady Gaga, letting rip with regular “Brrrava”s and weird hints of Russian). Or go for something lighter – a Caprese salad? – in the manner of Jeremy Irons’s purring approximation. For dessert, there’s Salma Hayek scheming with husky verve in a mud bath.
No one in this wildly uneven all-star boondoggle is heard to literally say the words, “When’sa your Dolmio day?”, but Jared Leto, whose falsetto caricature is, at points in the film, almost beyond human hearing, comes the closest.
Do these accents ruin House of Gucci? Absolutely not. Their wayward variety only adds to it as a camp artefact. But many films before it have been, if not scuppered, then at least scarred by actors whose voice work isn’t up to scratch. There’s nothing like a few strangled vowel sounds to throw us out of a film’s whole finale (hello, Quentin Tarantino’s “Australian” miner in Django Unchained) or make declarations of puppy love fall embarrassingly flat (Natalie Portman’s squawking, Englishadjacent Padmé in the Star Wars prequels).
If it’s Gucci-esque inconsistency you’re after, look no further than the stars of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), trotting out their individual stylings as if no one else mattered. Gary Oldman’s Transylvanian count, with his gooey outbursts, sonorous cackles and silky drawl, gets top marks by far; Anthony Hopkins barks “Ja!” a lot as Van Helsing and at least winds up at the fun end of overripe.
But, heavens above, Winona and Keanu. Their woeful attempts at “posh British” have gone down in film-making lore, with director Francis Ford Coppola admitting, in an interview with US magazine Entertainment Weekly in 2015, that he knew at the time of filming that Reeves was off-the-mark but didn’t criticise him because the actor was trying so hard and because he liked him so much “personally”.
And it’s true that accents in movies gain particular notoriety when it feels like a Hollywood star’s inflated ego is to blame for their miscasting. You could definitely level this at, shall we say, the broad Irish twangs both Brad Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones attempted while playing IRA bombers: Pitt in the ill-fated The Devil’s Own (1997), and Jones, notching up career-worst honours, as the insane baddie in Blown Away (1994).
For another ignominious pairing, try the two Russian submarine captains Sean Connery and Harrison Ford played, in The Hunt for Red October (1990) and K-19: The Widowmaker (2002). In both cases these international megastars, rarely feted for what you might call their chameleonic gifts, suggested an acquaintance with Mother Russia that sounded remote at best. (Dennis Lim of the Village Voice said Ford was “acting without a nyet”.)
Of course, as you’d expect, stars take lessons before they y step on to the set. Kate Winslet, for example, xample, has been working with the same ame dialect coach, Susan Hegarty, for most of her career and trained with Hegarty before filming her acclaimed role as Pennsylvanian ian detective Mare Sheehan eehan in this year’s Mare of Easttown.
Actors still tip into to parodic stereotype on a regular basis, though gh – a criticism you could level at the entire ensemble in last year’s “Oirish” romcom Wild Mountain Thyme, starring Emily Blunt and Jon
Hamm, and Don Cheadle’s “cor blimey, guv’nor!” munitions guy in the Ocean’s films.
I do feel for the performers who routinely get singled out in this hall of shame. Accents, along with wigs, prosthetics and other embellishments, are an element of an actor’s performance that can so easily be pounced on, especially when the knives are out for a film in general. Russell Crowe presumably felt it was a cheap shot when he was told by Mark Lawson in a Radio 4 interview that “hints of Irish” could be heard in his performance as Robin Hood in 2010.
“You’ve seriously got dead ears, mate, if you think that’s an Irish accent,” Crowe snapped, before yanking off the mic and storming out of the interview.
Nailing an accent is a minefield – one so littered with cadavers that it’s a wonder actors dare tread through it at all, even if acclaim ac can occasionally greet them on o the other side. Tom Hardy, regularly regul critical of his own vocal work, wo was a very respectable Welshman Welsh in Locke (2013). In the mid1990s, when Gwyneth Paltrow Pa rose to stardom, I wouldn’t be surprised if a large a chunk of the viewing audience a simply assumed she was English, after she hopped across the Atlantic near-flawlessly for the triple-whammy t of Emma, Sliding S Doors and Shakespeare S in Love.
Meryl Streep has often been called the queen of the accent – think back to her whole panoply of Oscary roles. They run the gamut from intense Polish in Sophie’s Choice (1982), to impeccably modulated Danish as Karen Blixen in Out of Africa (1985) and, of course, Margaret Thatcher, captured with near-creepy skill in The Iron Lady (2011). She’s a one-woman accent jukebox.
Streep’s inflections rarely suggest a generic stab at a country, though – they’re compellingly specific, with the eccentricities each of these women demanded.
The preparation required can be daunting: just ask Lady Gaga, who was inspired by her Italian ancestry to take on the role of Patrizia Reggiani in the first place. For nine full months she stayed in character, trying to live and breathe as Reggiani and, crucially, speaking as her, a process she has said caused her to lose touch with reality somewhere along the way.
Few other actors go to these lengths, but plenty insist on maintaining their accent on set and in between takes. During the filming of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, for example, Daniel Day-Lewis refused to speak to any British crew members for fear that the conversation would lead him to drop his imitation of the US president’s high-pitched Kentucky tones.
And Streep, on the set of The Iron Lady, announced to her colleagues, in Mrs T’s voice: “Please do forgive me if I talk in this accent all day, but if I don’t keep it up between takes, I’ll lose the bloody thing and not get it back.”
Our own Christian Bale employed a similar tactic on American Psycho, never speaking in his real accent or socialising with anyone during filming. And, in 2005, Bale even went a step further: maintaining the American accent of Bruce Wayne throughout the entire press tour for Batman Begins, as a homage, he said, to a comic-book icon.
As for House of Gucci, few people who are in the market for enjoying it would prefer the accents to have been less crazy, I suspect, or more of a piece. If I ever sit down again to Anaconda (1997), the infamy of Jon Voight’s Spanish ham – a great tranche of crudely-hacked Serrano – will be lying in wait to make the experience complete.
The thing with bad accents is that they’re like bad films – over time, we forgive some of the dodgy ones, and even grow fond of the worst.
House of Gucci is in cinemas now