People rave about the The Departed, but actually, aside from Matt Damon, who grew up there, the accents were horrible.
Same with Good Will Hunting. Casey Affleck, even though from there, had an accent that was almost forced.
I’ve yet to see any movie, set in the Boston area, that has both an accurate accent and proper inflection.
Please, fight my ignorance.
(I grew up in Worcester, MA in a blue collar family with VERY thick accents and I had one myself until I started traveling and living different places. I know the intracacies of the local vernacular and the subtle pronounciations of common words beyond “I pahk my cah.”)
I’ve wondered about this myself, and I’ve concluded that it’s a really, really hard accent to imitate. I couldn’t say why, exactly. But I’ve even found that people who grew up with the accent and then lost it can no longer do it convincingly. I think there’s a tendency to overdo, and for most actors, their “Boston” accent comes out like overbaked faux Brooklyn.
There’s also some confusion of which accent to shoot for. The working-class accent and the Kennedy accent have very little in common, though I think in the popular imagination, they’re pretty much the same.
Accents are incredibly difficult because alot of people don’t really know what they sound like to other people. And there’s often no REAL definitive accent.
Not every working class Bostonian is going to sound the same. There’s going to be common traits but they aren’t identical.
The OP points out Casey Affleck’s native accent sounding forced… except that’s his accent… That’s how he talks. How can it be forced or inauthentic? It’s how he taaaallllkkkssss.
Complaining about subtlties of accents is headache inducing.
So, Dudley, I’m from Arkansas and I was in your fine city about 10 years ago. I got lost looking for a gym. I kept making circles around this same donut shop. There was a cop sitting in there. (I know it sounds like the beginning of a joke but I’m serious). Anyway, I went in and asked him how to find this place and he told me a number of times to take a left just up the street on Cancud. For the life of me I couldn’t remember there being a Cancud street up ahead. It took a number of responses from both of us before I figured out he wanted to me to take a left on Concord and for him to realize I wasn’t just having a go at him.
And I was in my cah.
The great character actor Ken Howard was in the otherwise unmemorable series “Crossing Jordan” and delivered what I considered to be an authentic Boston accent.
The other side of the coin: I was doing a public presentation in East Boston for a Massport project we were working on. After the meeting, some residents came up and asked me where I picked up my accent.
As for even Bostonian actors, not doing the accent quite right, this is just a WAG, but I would imagine that an actor with a strong regional accent hoping to work consistently immediately sets out to tame their accent. And once that is accomplished, I’d think it hard to slip perfectly back into it.
The other problem with the “Boston” accent, is that it changes fairly radically in some very short differences. A couple of towns north of Boston, you get a Revere accent (heavily Italian area), then move north a bit to Lynn/Peabody (Irish & French populations), then up further to southern NH (Very heavily French).
My family is from Lynn, and I can pick out that accent from a crowd of folks from the general Boston area in just a few words. My wife (from Southern NH) can’t tell the difference between them.
The South Shore versions of the Boston accent are just as different, extending down to the Rhode Island variant.
Kennedys don’t sound like Bostonians… or at least none of the ones that I’d be likely to associate with.
Then of course, you have some of us that have trained out our accent, and it only returns when highly emotional, drunk, or over tired. I’ve often been accused of not being a native Bostonian, though my first word was spoken in Lynn, and I grew up on the North Shore.
Ugh, I thought he was awful. His faux accent was too broad and would wander in and out. I found him extremely distracting because his accent was so bad.
Wow, I think I’m butler1850. I was born in Salem, MA and raised in Lynn/Danvers before heading north to Nashua, NH when I was 10. I spent considerable energy denying my North Shore accent and today pride myself on not having one…except when “highly emotional, drunk, or over tired” or anywhere near my mother’s side of the family who still reside in Danvers/Peabody/Lynn/Salem. During those times my mother becomes “Mah” and my Rs begin slipping away.
It actual pains me that I can’t speak a convincing accent on command anymore, it really does sound forced.
As for The Departed, both Mark Wahlberg and Matt Damon were convincing. What really gets me laughing is Leonardo DiCaprio’s “whad are you gonna do, chowp me up an feed me to da poor?”
Well, Constant Reader, it’s a similar story, but I was born in Omaha Nebraska (Offutt AFB), but otherwise, very similar.
Mah definitely comes out around that crowd as well for me!
You’re also right about it being frustrating to use the accent “on purpose.” It feels forced to drop an “R” in the same way it felt forced to start using the “R” when I made a conscious effort to lose some of the accent.
I was, by the way, a telephone salesman when I started working on my accent, and the poor slow talkers in the midwest and south couldn’t understand a word I said, when I used my Boston speaking voice. Even the “slow” version.
Now, see if you were in Wustah (Worcester), you would have heard, “Konkid.”
I forgot about Mark Wahlberg being in The Departed (Da-pah-tid – or Wustah: Da-pah-tit) so I missed that one. Yeah, he’s actually a better Boston spokesperson. He grew up in Dorchester (Duah-ches-tah) and I think his accent was much thicker than Matt Damon’s to being with.
Simple words like dollar are badly pronounced. There is just as much of accent at the beginning than there is at the end, but the actor’s don’t pick it on it. They concentrate too much on the “ah” sound at the end. It comes out like “daw-lah.” See, that’s wrong and is easily picked out by a listening ear. The real pronounciation is “d’oll’ah” or “d’yoll’ah.”
Or words like potatoes. In Worcester it’s “ba-day-dahs.”
My mother grew up in Easton, MA (south shore) and she pronounces “shorts” like “shots.” And it’s not that she can’t do something, she just “cahn’t.” This is only a north/south shore accent. Worcesterites say “can’t.” They say “shuahts.”
I have an aunt who pronounces sure like “sho-ah.”
I could go on and on. But I’ve never seen any of the above in any movie.
As a native of the northwest suburbs of Boston, I agree with much of the above that it’s hard for any outsider to do any variation of the Boston accent properly. What gets me, though–especially in the most egregious examples of bad accents–is why did they even bother putting it into the character?
Case in point, also from The Departed… of all the bad Boston accents, the worst, most-distracting, and completely unnecessary, was that of Vera Farmiga (Madolyn). It was downright painful! There are plenty of Bostonians–even natives–that don’t have much of an accent beyond standard American, and it certainly wouldn’t have been at all unusual for her presumably-educated character to have either a) ditched her accent while in college, or b) have come to Boston from somewhere else to go to school and settled here to work. Why in the world did we have to suffer through all that from a central character with a huge amount of lines??
The movie “Beautiful Girls” also had some really bad accents, including some local axioms that just don’t exist: “Man, that really creased me.” I guess it means that it pissed off the character. I’ve never heard the term “creased” before in my life used in such a manner.
My wife is from the South Shore of Boston. I’m from Texas.
When our son was learning to speak, he pronounced “car” as “kah” when speaking to his mother, and “car” when speaking to me. I used to say that he was learning two languages: English and Bostonian!
Once my wife gave me directions over the phone, and told me to look for “Burmer” Road. When I found the road, it was actually “Burma Road.” I later asked her how she would have pronounced it if it had been “Burmer.” “Bur-mah,” she replied. :smack:
Try being a Southerner and watching any TV show or movie which has a character from the South. Go on, I dare ya.
sighs
Even Julia Roberts, who naturally has a lovely soft Georgia accent, was forced to do the fake cornpone thing in Steel Magnolias.
When I saw Broadcast News and Holly Hunter said her first few lines, I nearly wept with delight that someone finally got it right. Later found out that she, like Julia, grew up in the Atlanta area.
This is a pet peeve of mine, as well. I’ve lived in Massachusetts and Rhode Island my whole life. I have a fairly neutral accent, having been raised in Western Mass, but not so far west that you get the Maine-like accent. I notice when people have Boston accents, and it’s probably somewhere on the order of 5-10 percent of the metropolitan Boston population. It actually always seemed to me to be much more common in people from the North Shore and the South Shore than Boston proper (I lived in Dorchester for several years, but by that time, it was a melting pot of recent immigrants rather than the Irish community usually shown in movies).
