Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn, a kind of philosophical Moses when it comes to articulating wokeness, has written an 8.13 column titled “From Blonde to Star Wars, Hollywood Needs to Accept Actors’ Accents.”
Right away you’re thinking okay, Kohn is going to argue that it’s not the performances that matter these days, but the representations. Which he more or less does.
Okay, the performances matter to some extent, but probably not as much as the electrifying idea of a Cuban-born woman playing Marilyn Monroe with the accent of a Cuban Airlines flight attendant….that’s something to really feel good about and celebrate.
It follows, naturally, that anyone who has a problem with a Cuban-accented Marilyn is a bigot.
Kohn is also going to argue, you’re thinking, that Moses Ingram‘s Baltimore street accent fits right into the Obi-Wan Kenobi universe without a hiccup, and that anyone who complains about Ingram not speaking in the crisp British speech patterns of previous Imperial villains (a tradition that goes back 45 years) is also a bigot, or at the very least someone who doesn’t get it.**
But Kohn doesn’t argue this. He kinda dodges the issue, in fact. He implies, of course, that people who’ve expressed concerns about Ingram’s Obi-Wan performance are racists (he wouldn’t be a good wokester troubador if he didn’t) but otherwise he doesn’t even allude to the arguments that ensued after Obi-Wan premiered.
As for the Blonde star, he relies on a quote from Bodies Bodies Bodies costar Maria Bakalova, to wit: “I think Ana de Armas is an incredibly talented actress and that’s what should matter. It sounds like she has her natural accent and it should be about the feeling you get from the performance.”
Due respect but no. Armas is playing an iconic superstar whom everyone knows rather well, and who spoke with an unmistakably homespun Los Angeles accent. I think it’s silly for anyone to play her with a Cuban accent, or for that matter a British, Russian or Australian one. We’re all residents of the planet earth and we all know what goes so why are we playing games when it comes to portraying famous people? It invites derision.
If you’re going to dye your hair platinum blonde and wear all those flashy Monroe outfits (as de Armas did) you’re obviously making a stab at physical resemblance, so speaking-wise you should at least try to sound like her. Or allow yourself to be dubbed. (You know what would’ve been cool? If tech guys had digitally reconstituted Monroe’s voice into micro-vowels and micro-consonants and then dubbed AdA with Monroe’s actual voice, so to speak. Seriously.)
The next time they make a movie about John F. Kennedy, how about casting Gael Garcia Bernal in the part? Okay, so Bernal is six or seven inches shorter than Kennedy was and he doesn’t resemble him even slightly, but the important thing would be the representation aspect…right, Eric?
** All films set in the past or in fantasy realms have adhered to certain ways of speaking for the good and bad guys. Generally speaking villains allied with or backed by powerful forces tend to sound more disciplined and mannered in a high-class way than their underdog victims.
