Poetic License

Following on from my grand Scottish highlands adventure, I felt compelled to watch Braveheart. It's been a while since I watched Mel Gibson strut around in a skirt doing a grave disservice to historical fact and paraphrasing Shakespeare's St Crispin's Day speech, so it was clearly time to dust it off. Whatever else it may be, it's a well told story that needed more time spent on it before it came out in the cinemas. Some of the time should have been allocated to editing the three hour monster. More of it should have been given over to testing Mel Gibson's accent.

It never ceases to amaze me the way movies gloss over the speech patterns of big name actors. Personally, I think unless the poor accent is for comic effect (witness, Peter Sellers' famous Inspector Clousseau and his discovery of a "berm"), they'd be better off skipping the big name actor for the one who can actually convince me that they're really from that place. And Mel? Well, he might pass in Hollywood, but to anyone who's ever met an actual Scot, his accent is appalling. Not quite as bad as casting Michael Caine to play a German (funniest thing ever to hear a cockney pretending to be German...but not really trying very hard), but really, not too far off from the tragic effect of casting Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as Irish in Far and Away.

Why do they think that they can get away with not only moving the location of a story from its original landscape (has anyone seen Stirling where the first Braveheart battle takes place? No? How about Bells Beach, where the final scenes of Point Break are supposed to happen, then?), but that they can have unconvincing people cast just for their name? I'm not saying all actors are incapable of accents. Meryl Streep does a great impression of Lindy Chamberlain, to mention one example, but why on earth don't they either screen test them, or at the very least get some proper coaching for them? I'm fine with them using true stories as inspiration - that's hardly a new thing - and distorting the portrayal of certain characters to suit the narrative. That sort of thing has been going on for centuries. But a little consistency elsewhere, please. I'm begging. Because I don't know how many more films I can sit through where the lead is played by someone who seems to have never heard the accent he or she is supposed to be doing.

Perhaps I'd better watch Mel, once more, just to check. Or maybe I'll have to check out Brad Pitt's bad Irish accent in The Devil's Own. It's all research, you understand. I'm willing to put myself through a couple of hours of Brad in the name of research. Now, how to find a copy of that one...