An Accented Perspective

Recently, I watched the film, Sliding Doors, on DVD (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120148/) I hadn't seen the movie since it came out 10 years ago. It's a good film about the nature of chance that has the audience follow a woman's life depending on whether she makes it onto a subway train or misses it by a few seconds.

Sliding Doors is set in London and Gwyneth Paltrow is the lead. In 1998 I wasn't very familiar with her career and thought that she was an English actress. Of course, she is as American as apple pie and can perform a very good British accent. But now that I watch the film, I find myself paying a lot of attention to her accent, looking for slip ups. On the most recent viewing, I did notice that Paltrow's character does use a lot of English slang, probably more than the other characters in the film. So while I still enjoyed the movie, I found myself distracted by the accent. Perhaps this is why many popular performers are told not to use an accent in their films.

Of course accents can have the opposite effect as is the case with Paltrow's costar, John Hannah. Hannah has a distinctive Scottish accent that would probably sound cool even if he was evicting you from your home!