That isn’t what I meant. I thought Freeman’s role was well-written and, as usual, well-executed. I just meant that if they wanted to go for over-the-top stereotypes, they might as well have gone all the way.
I grew up in the backwoods of Kentucky, so there isn’t much you can tell me about mangling the Queen’s English. It tends to be mangled in very particular ways, though, depending on where you are in the South, and the Southerners in this movie were not even close to anything, anywhere.
This is a pet peeve of mine. Actors will spend weeks with dialect coaches making sure they sound like they’re from the right neighborhood in London, but then they’re playing a Southerner, they just talk slow, try to sound as stupid as possible, and say “y’all” a lot.
As for the stereotypes: a beloved English professor once told me (as we were discussing a particularly bad short story I had written) that the fact that such people really exist doesn’t make it any less of a stereotype. The writer’s job is to make the character into something more. I don’t really take personal offense at the stereotypical Southerners–I just think it’s lazy writing.
I can’t argue with you here. I was born a Yankee but my family is scattered about the South and I have friends in Texas and one problem with many Yankees is the misconception that all Southern dialects are the same. Most people cannot tell the difference between dialects from North Carolina, Texas, Alabama, and Kentucky, let alone the variety of dialects in each of these states. It would be refreshing if Hollywood actually paid attention to these subtleties but people apparently content to wrongfully assume that all Southerner’s are just ignorant hillbillies (or ‘ridgerunners’ if you want to nitpick )