Accents

Over the weekend I watched Contagion - really good film, tense, genuinely moving and surprising and any movie which has the nerve to kill off both Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Winslet deserves respect. The only thing which bothered me during the film (apart from the fact that my wife had a cold!!) was Jude Law's bizarre accent. I have no idea what he was aiming for. At times it was Australian, drifted into South African occasionally with a hint of Dick Van Dyke cockney. The annoying thing was that there seemed to be no need for it. His character could have been English, American or Mongolian - it was not relevant to the story. What it did was distract attention from an engrossing story and remind you that that was Jude Law doing a daft accent rather than believing in him as a character in a story.
I felt the same thing watching Russell Crowe in Robin Hood (which also committed the previously unheard of crime of making one of the oldest stories in English literature boring) and, going back a few years, Marlon Brando in Mutiny on the Bounty.
Directors, and actors, should remember that audiences are ready to suspend disbelief. It is part of the deal we make when we sit down to watch a film. We will go along with a 'wrong' accent if it is consistently wrong - it is when it varies so much we lose interest. That is why Kevin Costner, with a broad MidWestern accent was more believable as the Sherwood outlaw than Crowe. Sean Connery was Scottish whether he played an Irish cop, an English agent or a Russian submarine commander. I also re watched Te Hunt for Red October and remembered how good a film it was. Connery was totally convincing because his accent was the same all the way through. Consistency leads to congruency.

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