The White Council

Re: My enthusiasm for this adaptation wanes...

Tolkien and Inklings Discussion

: : I thought they were going to be English too...what a pity. Now I have visions of these two guys butchering a British accent.

: c'mon guys, let's give them a chance. yeah I agree that they should use British accents but maybe they can fake it well. i'm sure they'll have coaches and all that jazz. as my friend says--speculation continues...

The other night I happened to watch (for the umpteenth time since I was no taller than a Hobbit), Treasure Island with Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper. Now here's a story that is also close the hearts of British and Americans and also loved around the world by youngsters who dream of finding pirate treasure and sailing the seven seas. The cast appears to be predominantly British with the obvious exception of Beery and Cooper. Beery's "pirate" drawl is difficult to pin down - neither British nor American - just stereotypical piratese (Avast ye lubbers kind of talk). Cooper on the other hand leaves us with no doubt about where he's from. And yet, somehow the story is powerful enough (or I've seen it so often), that the accents don't present a real problem. Had Cooper tried to fake a bad English accent his acting would have suffered. And when you compare many of the performances of child actors in the 1930's and 40's, you begin to see why Cooper was considered very good. I just mention this in case Elijah Wood does NOT do an English accent, though I suspect that we'll all be wondering why he has an American accent when all his relatives and friends have an English accent. But if the story is as powerfully filmed as it was written, we should be so caught up in it that we'll hardly notice. Meryl Streep seems to be able to master any and all dialects and accents to a "T". Other actors can't. I'd rather EW use his normal voice if he can't do a proper English accent. A poorly done accent would be more distracting to me. Some people complained that Vivian Leigh's oh-so-suth'un southern accent in Gone With The Wind was a bit over the top, and that no one in the South talks that way. But I think that complaint was made by Southerners who DO talk that way. :) But I don't know if there was a debate in America about having an English person play a role in what is essentially an American epic. So I guess I could make an argument to our British cousins that if we can let a British actress play a lead role in a VERY American film like Gone With The Wind, then can't they allow an American to play a role in a VERY British story? I've prety much run out of rational arguments about accents not being all that important. Will even the orcs have English accents? Maybe we should all be thankful that film isn't being made by Sergio Leone in Italian with dubbed English that don't quite match the mouth movements, like A Fist Full Of Dollars. When the LOTR is released on DVD we can all listen to it in French or Spanish with English subtitles if we don't like Elijah's accent.