What’s the deal? I come from the south, but do other people normally fall for the southern accents in some movies? Most of them normally sound like some bad ripoff of a plantation owner from the Antebellum period.
One particularly bad one was Keanu Reeves in “The Devil’s Advocate” But that is Keanu, right? Not a fair criticism.
What about Alec Baldwin in “Ghosts of Mississippi” His was very annoying.
George Clooney in “O’ Brother where Art Thou” Had a different accent, but his character wasn’t from Mississippi. The other two characters were passable, but then again it was set in the depression and I imagine that accents could change too. But I think that John Tuturro’s character had a pretty good accent.
So. Do non-southerners notice a bad accent as well as we do? And does anyone here have any good or bad examples to cite?
The southern accents in movies come from exactly one source: other movies.
The leading southern dialect coach in Hollywood (memory of an old NPR profile) is a guy in New York who’s never been south of Greenwich Village. This is the guy who they had teach Julia Roberts a Georgia accent for Steel Magnolias. See, she was pronouncing her Rs, but this guy said she should be dropping them.
Oh, and Julia Roberts is from Georgia.
Yes, it’s a very real problem. A few of us have been aware of it for a long time. Hopefully the next administration will find room in the budget to finally do something about it.
(lissener, born in Texas, with an ear and talent for accents.)
The worst thing about it to me is that apparently all Southern accents sound the same to the Hollywood ear. On movies and in television, we see families in which the father sounds like he’s from North Carolina, the mother from Tennessee, one child from Alabama, and another from Texas. For Southerners, it can be challenging to suspend disbelief when a rural isolated family doesn’t even talk alike. And of course, quite often, the accent is not discernably anything at all, but merely a poorly synthesized mish-mash of Hillbilly and Ebonics.
I am from middle Georgia, and it really grates on me. Julia Roberts has an excuse, though. Smyrna couldn’t be much whiter, in the faux-posh SoCal sense.
William Fichtner in Albino Alligator pulled off something I’d never seen in movies before - a great New Orleans accent. It’s an incredibly obscure and complex accent, and he’s the first non-New Orleanian I’ve ever heard nail it.
And I have the same problem with Brits (and others of the Union) playing Americans. They don’t sound British but they don’t sound quite right. Best example is the scads of non-Americans playing Americans in Blackhawk Down.
As to Southern accents, as annoying as bad accents is when Northerns complain about “fake” accents on real southerners. I came across this on a discussion of West Wing in which someone was dissing Emily Procter, who played Ainsley Haines. She has a Carolina accent because that’s where she’s from. It might not sound good to some people, but not everyone in the south speaks exactly like Scarlett O’Hara. In fact, pretty much no one does.
Elizabeth Taylor trying to play a Southern woman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof holds the record for worst accent in my book. Of course, she spends most of the movie in either a neglige’ or a tight, form fitting dress so I shouldn’t complain too much.
I think the basic problem is that there’s no single “Southern Accent”, but the accents are highly regionalized.
A few of the regional accents I can pick out:
Upstate South Carolina (the Greenville area)
North Carolina down east.
Johnson County
Tidewater Virginia
North Georgia
South Georgia
None of those sound anything like the horrendous accents used in the movies.
For Worst Fake Southern Accent, I nominate Robby Benson for his mush-mouthed performance in Ode to Billie Joe.
(Note to actors: The hallmark of a bad fake Southern accent is pronouncing “anything” as “anythin’.”)
From the OP:
Clooney is from Kentucky. His accent sounded authentic to my hillbilly ears.
I thought Turturro’s accent was passable in O Brother! (in a broadly comic way) but then he turned around and gave us one of the worst fake Southern accents ever committed to film in Secret Window.
Liberal is right about Sling Blade. It’s one of the few movies in which all the accents are authentic. (Because all of the actors in Sling Blade are either native Southerners or children of same.)
A bad fake accent destroys a movie for me. Takes me right out of the story.
It would be easier for me to suspend disbelief if they just used their normal accent than screwing up the southern one.
That is a travesty that the Southern Accent coach has never been to the South.
I guess it will never change though, becaue nobody up north seems to notice.
Sling Blade was good though. Its true that they all were real accents, so it worked perfectly.
What about Mathew Macconaughey (I know that’s not spelled right!) in A time to kill? I think it was okay, but he’s from Texas. Of course they did sweat all the time in the movie. We DO have AC you know
What about Ashley Judd and Keanu Reeves in The Devil’s Advocate? It could have been a great movie had it not been for their fake southern accents. I would give Keanu a pass. They should have just set it somewhere in the Rural north and it would have been more believable.
The girl’s accent in The War trumped Kevin Costner’s generally shitty Southern accent ten-fold. I wanted to shoot her in the vocal cords every time she talked, especially when she talked about writing her “memwaaahhs.”
I rented that movie in 1995 and I’m still scarred by it.
Martin Sheen (as General Lee)'s accent in Gettysburg was terrible. I love the movie despite that, however. Althought it does take some effort to get past Sheen’s accent.
I’ve always been impressed whenever Tom Berenger does a Southern accent (I see he was born in Chicago). What do you other Southerners think? I wonder what he was thinking during, for example, his scenes with Martin Sheen (Damn, that is one shitty accent. What the hell…has this guy even been south of the Ohio River? OK, let it go, Tom. Just do the scene…)
To be fair, it is difficult to learn perfectly any accent, especially one that is “non-standard” (by this I mean not the dialect used by the establishment, this is not a judgement). Furthermore, as many of you point out, there are quite a few different accents in the south and many of them are not widely known.
In the end, I’m not defending the lack of good southern accents in movies, but I think this should be kept in perspective.
Oh, and I’ve noticed that different people care different amounts about this. I think it depends on how much you are aware of accents and how much you feel your accent defines you. (And how much your accent is considered to define you by others).
I’ve also noted that as far as Hollywood is ofen concerned, there must be a thousand-foot-high brick wall separating North and South. Someone from Louisville, Kentucky (right on the Ohio river) might be portrayed with the stereotypical Southern accent you noted above, while someone from Cincinnati, Ohio (on the Ohio river about a hundred miles upstream from Louisville) would not be required to have that atrocious accent. I’ve never been to either city but I would imagine their accents wouldn’t be all that different, being so close and all.
I’ve noticed very few Southern accents I would actually call bad. These actors might not sound like they’re from round these parts, but that doesn’t mean they don’t sound Southern. As others have pointed out, there’s an enormous variation of accents, even across a single state. Loretta Lynn and I don’t really sound that much alike if you’re really listening, even though we’re both from Kentucky. I’m from the eastern edge of what could be considered the western part of the state, and she’s from the hills of the eastern part. (Incidentally, she sounds almost exactly like my husband’s grandmother, who is either from the same county or the next one over.) It seems to ludicrous that listening to both of us, someone would claim that one of us isn’t doing the accent right.
Also, couple nitpicks: Julia Roberts didn’t need to learn a Georgia accent for Steel Magnolias because it was set in Louisiana. If she was working with a dialect coach, she should have been learning a Louisiana accent. Also, Ashley Judd is from Kentucky, just like George Clooney, and when she does a Southern accent, she sounds quite a bit like her mother and sister, the country singers. If Clooney automatically sounds Southern because of growing up in Kentucky, so does she.
