That big lad from Ancient Greece

Since we've been doing a lot of political posting recently, it might be time for a temporary excursion into other fields. And so it is that we finally got around to seeing some previews for the Oliver Stone Alexander film over the weekend. As our well-informed readers doubtless already know, the title role belongs to Irish actor Colin Farrell. And while we try to avoid the all-round boosterism that comes with Irish success abroad, we certainly didn't see any harm in an Irish actor getting a big part in one of those epic productions where the acting is secondary to the battle scenes anyway.

But that was before we heard the words come out of Colin/Alexander's mouth. The accent, my God, the accent. A quick Google search revealed that this does appear to be considered, shall we say, an issue:

An insider tells the magazine [ContactMusic], "He sounds like a Dublin bus driver."

Now, we tried to go through the obvious thought process on this one ... lots of classical roles are played with English or American accents, and no-one ever complains about those; indeed it's a safe bet that the popular conception of actual historical characters incorporates them having the accents that come with English theatre training.

So are we just giving into this well cornered market when we say that we cringed at Colin's Bertie-esque inflections? Maybe. It's just that ... Farrell is trying to have it both ways: he plays to the stereotype of the Irish wild man in what often seems like a deliberate strategy to build an aura in Hollywood:

Hellraiser Colin Farrell almost faced the wrath of movie maker Oliver Stone after breaking his ankle and his wrist with three days of Alexander still to film. The Irishman fell down a stairway after living it up at a party co-star Val Kilmer threw for the cast and crew in Thailand and passed out. He woke up in agony with broken bones, and Stone admits he came close to ruining the film's ending.

So sometimes we get the antics and the aut(h)entic, gritty Dublin films, but other times we get an aspiring Patrick Stewart.

Again, we might be wrong. Is Colin being truer to his own self than Navan man Pierce Brosnan, who told his oft-repeated accent story to Sunday's New York Times:

Q: Did anyone ever ask you to lose your Irish accent?

A: It's not really Irish anymore. I have my own sound. When I was a young actor in London, they didn't like it -- they forced me to play the token Paddy. But in America, I found my voice. It's now an international sort of accent.

UPDATE [Nov 24]: It looks like there's a reviewer consensus that Farrell's accent is a bit of a problem, but as such it pales in comparison to the film's much bigger problems, which can be tracked back to director Oliver Stone. Here's one review in Slate:

At his [Farrell's] best, he's shrewdly small-scale. You can imagine him firing up the lads at the pub before he gets too stuporous. But all the armies of the Western world? He doesn't begin to have the stature—or the lung power.