Distant Voices

Q: What do An Education and A Single Man have in common?







A: Rather a lot, actually. Both are set in the early 1960s, a time of nuclear anxiety, a fear addressed and expressed by the main young character in each film. Both feature a socially transgressive relationship between a youth on the cusp of adulthood and an older man in or close to middle age. In An Education you imagine that Peter Sarsgaard was chosen partly because he was the closest that the film-makers could find to a thirtysomething Colin Firth, who would have been perfect in the role of the supposedly charismatic, slightly sleazy David. Sarsgaard's a decent actor but doesn't project the magnetism that David must surely have been intended to possess to attract and all but derail Jenny (Carey Mulligan who deserves much of the extravagant praise that she has won in recent months). There's something too uncertain about him, a problem rooted in his delivery - some of this nervousness is clearly intentional and subtle, suggesting David's shiftiness, his unease, his latent guilt at his various deceptions - but some is also perhaps down to the actor's struggle to maintain his English accent. Being aware of an actor's struggle to find their character's voice is inevitably a distraction. This has clearly not been a problem at all for many viewers and would presumably not be noticed by non-English audiences anyway.





This reminded me of an interview that Cher did in this country to plug Mermaids. It was the latest American-accented performance from Bob Hoskins who had been outstanding on stage as Nathan Detroit in the National Theatre production of Guys and Dolls and acting against a cast of cartoons in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and when asked how it was the Hoskins had so perfectly mastered the accent, his co-star rather brutally, although not without humour, stated that he didn't sound American to her.





Another interesting case was The Crying Game in which the casting of Forest Whitaker as a cockney soldier and Miranda Richardson as an Irish terrorist/freedom fighter seemed to be an interesting, conscious or unconscious clue to the fact that not everything or everyone here was what they seemed - and such coy spoiler-avoidance may not be necessary after all these years, but still...





A Single Man features three of the four central characters adopting transatlantic voices, Matthew Goode and Nicholas Hoult playing Americans and Julianne Moore playing an uptight and often if not always tight English woman. The tension in these performances, the concentration needed to sustain them is perfectly fitting for a film that is about the obsessive need of the central character George (a quite magnificent Firth) to be and to be seen to be in control. While Goode's and Hoult's accents seem all but faultless to the English ear, Moore's effort to retain her clipped accent - and there is the odd stumble over certain vowel sounds - somehow works. One film scripted, beautifully by Nick Hornby, the other featuring two actors (Hoult and Firth) who've performed notably in adaptations of Hornby novels (About a Boy and Fever Pitch respectively), they are both in not wholly dissimilar ways, very moving films exploring the conflict between restraint and emotional expression, about the elusiveness, the pain of romantic love.



What's the similar connection between Glenn Close & Andie McDowell in Greystoke: Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes and Jean Hagen & Debbie Reynolds in Singin' in the Rain?

The answer to the question in the last posting was that all four have played movie time-travellers, but three Malcolm McDowell, Guy Pearce and Rod Taylor have played versions of HG Wells' character from The Time Machine (Pearce and Taylor, whose character was in fact called Wells, in the two big screen adaptations of the novel and McDowell playing Wells himself in Time after Time), while Michael J Fox played the teenage time-traveller Marty McFly in the Back to the Future trilogy.