Good lord, why can't they make movies with real Southern accents?

Cafe Society
1

Jesus Christ on a cracker! I was looking around on the Netflix Watch Instantly list, and I thought I’d see how the movie of The Prince of Tides turned out. I have an ambiguous relationship with the book.

And, you know, it’s probably a good movie, but I can’t tell for the life of me, because every time these people open their mouths I feel vaguely ill. These people are filming in Beaufort and Charleston. Everybody around is speaking a real Lowcountry dialect, probably. But noooooo, we have to have Movie Southern Accent instead. (Three different ones so far, of course.) Actually, the mother isn’t bad, considering she’s supposed to be somebody who desperately wants to be a higher class of Southerner than she is, and I have actually heard people talk like that. But Nick Nolte? Come on, son. He’s trying real hard, and it isn’t nearly as bad as I’ve heard in other movies, I confess. But dude. And Blythe Danner, please.

These people (except for Blythe Danner - she supposed to be from a mill town, which is even less probable) are supposed to be from way down in the Lowcountry, in Colleton County. They’re supposed to be low class whites on the river. They sound like they’re from, I don’t know, Nowhere South. Maybe, uh, Atlanta? Not high-north Georgia but definitely not the coast or Albany. I don’t know what people sound like in Alabama but probably not like this. Anyway, what they don’t sound like is shrimpers, black or white.

So my question is, why don’t they bother? This is a big movie, right? And it’s a movie that is inextricably tied to its locations - the island is practically another character in the book, at any rate. Why not go there and spend a day talking to people? With all that goes into making a movie, why not make the actors sound like real people? It’s funny - when Nolte isn’t pouring it on so hard and trying hard, his accent isn’t half bad, frankly. I can ignore the wrong bits when they aren’t tossing them in my face.

And yes, I get it, “nobody cares but you and the movie made money anyway”. But why do people who are dedicated to their craft not try harder? When it’s such an important part of the role, I just don’t get it.

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This could be a Southern accent-themed version of the threads about British actors’ American accents and vice versa, but one unique aspect is that the Southern accent in acting carries the baggage of having been a staple of a less sophisticated era. It has its own traditon, and in the world of show business, is an accent unto itself, based on a place and region no more than King Aurthur is based on Dark Age Britain.

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Frankly, I would rather have Foghorn Leghon, I say, I say, than the current “serious Pan-Southern drama accent”. A Southerner might have come up with that stentorian Maaaaaagnolias! accent, but never what Nick Nolte was shitting out.

ETA - on the other hand, you bring an interesting point that I have never heard before.

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One reason not to get *too *realistic is, the rest of us wouldn’t be able to understand WTF they are all saying.

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Maybe it’s harder to do, more nyuh-ance or some such. Texan accents don’t seem to be as hard to pick up, or at least I haven’t heard much glaring over the top accent butchery in movies set in Texas. Just imitate Boomhauer on King of the Hill and gol-dangyouprettymuchgotittharman.

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My wife complained about Julia Roberts southern accent and she grew up in Georgia.

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Yeah, because a real Southern accent is completely opaque? Dude, we’re not Glaswegian. Where are you from that you can’t understand a Southern accent?

When I saw Robert Duvall in Days of Thunder I didn’t realize he was doing an accent for most of the movie, because he was doing my accent. Now, I am not from the Lowcountry and that is indeed a different accent, but it can be done! (Did anybody have trouble understanding him? I seriously doubt it.)

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Edited to remove duplicate.

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I think most movies don’t bother to try for too much authenticity with local accents because they figure not enough people are going to recognize proper local accents to make it a big issue. Also, not all actors,no matter how good at their craft, can do accents.

I find regional accents distracting. I recently watched The Departed and found the Bostonian accent that Damon, DiCaprio and Wahlberg used annoying. They seemed to be the only ones using it. When Damon and DiCaprio were in the same scene I had a hard time following who was talking because they sounded so alike. I don’t know if the accents were authentic, I believe Damon is originally from Boston, so I’m guessing it was but I didn’t find the authenticity to add to the experience, instead I think it took away from it. Then again, I just plain hated the movie.

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Steel Magnolias is, of course, the best example of this. You have a handful of characters, all from the same small area in Louisiana. Instead of one general accent, you’ve got something like three real southern accents, all from different states, a couple super fake stage southern accents, and one or two honest attempts as a realistic Louisiana accent. It’s just a mess, from one end to the other, accent-wise.

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They don’t want real southern accents, they want stereotypical caricatures; all the more convenient for the portrayal of the types of characters southerners are generally assigned in the movies, like cross-eyed, inbred banjo-pickers, or the B.S. Scarlett O’Hara “Ah doo declayuh” thing.

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I’m from Southern California, and I gotta tell ya, some Southern accents are almost completely undecipherable to me.

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Because there’s no such thing as a “Southern accent.” There are probably something like 500 southern accents and they change every 50 miles or so.

Maybe one actor can nail the proper inflection for a movie character, but asking an entire cast to get all the subtleties of region, class, etc? That’s asking a lot of even skilled dialecticians.

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I haven’t seen the movie so I can’t comment on the accents, but both Matt Damon and Marky Mark are from Boston.

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They could add subtitles.

I’m only half-kidding here. I often see news stories where people are speaking (what I think is) perfectly understandable English, but because of a lisp or accent or some other minor variance, the clip gets subtitles.

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And the reason it’s complain-worthy, as I discussed in another thread, is that in Steel Magnolias she was coached into a fake Southern accent by THE Hollywood “Southern Accent Coach” who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

In response to the people who are saying, “It doesn’t really matter because no one outside the South would care about which type of Southern accent they’re doing …” Well, no. It DOES matter. First it matters because it’s an important level of detail. Imagine making a movie that takes place in the UK and having a character who is supposed to be from London but speaks with an Irish accent. You may or may not know the difference, but it’s a broad enough speech division that should be paid attention to. Second, the problem that we often encounter is that the supposed Southern Accent being spoken in the movie doesn’t exist in real life – it’s either just a bad job or a caricature. Have you ever heard any of the Monty Python boys try to do an American accent? They didn’t do it often in the TV show, but it’s all over the place in Meaning of Life and it’s painful. I can’t speak to how well they do the wide variety of UK accents they assign their characters, but they absolutely cannot do a convincing American accent. THIS is how most actors do a Southern accent – badly. I don’t care so much about whether they are doing a Tennessee accent that doesn’t technically fit on their South Carolina character. I DO care that they don’t have anything approaching a real Southern accent of any kind.

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Right after the Virginia Tech shootings, NPR interviewed the building custodian on the air. Damned if I could make heads or tails of what he was talking about. It was very nearly opaque. And that’s just Virginia!

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They arent completely convincing as women either. Oh, sure, they try, but there are subtle differences that give them away to the sophisticated observer.

It’s sketch comedy with a healthy dose of dadaism, for lord’s sake. Terry Gilliam for one can do a flawless American accent when he cares to.

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Much of the time, they were doing that on purpose. Bad accents are funny.

I’m sure there’s a cost-benefit analysis to all this: you can have all of your actors coached until they do a letter-perfect version of the Tennessee Valley accent in 1935, but how many people care if you get it right? People from that specific area might care, but they aren’t the difference between your movie being a hit or a flop. And frankly, it is probably hard to satisfy the locals. So attention gets focused elsewhere, because people will see the movie if the acting is good and the accent is mediocre than if the acting is terrible and the accent is great.

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As others have said, there is no one “Southern” accent, just as there is no one “English” accent. I can tell North Carolina apart from West Virginia, Mississippi apart from Virginia.

I thought Tim Blake Nelson’s accent in “O Brother Where Art Thou?” was excellent, reminded me of my grandfather from WV.