Thoughts on movie accents

Last night I saw “Defiance” on DVD. It’s a pretty good movie that depicts Jewish brothers in Belorussia who lead a group of Jews to survival in the deep forests throughout WWII. Not only do they have to face the Nazi Germans, but also Russian local police who have gone to the dark side and are getting 500 rubles for every Jew they bring in.

Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber (both fine actors) have lead roles, but are relegated to speaking in cheesy Russian accents. I got to thinking about this whole accent issue and here is my take on it:

Assume that the movie is an English language film. Assume that any given character (not the actor) is a native speaker in “X” language (not English).

• If the actor playing the character is actually speaking his character’s native language on screen, use sub-titles. (They actually did some of this with Craig and Schreiber speaking Russian and using sub-titles, which was cool with me.)
• If the actor playing the character is speaking actual English in the movie, then the actor must use an accent. Example: if a Japanese airline pilot is speaking with the control tower in English, the actor must use a Japanese accent. If the accent is even halfway decent it will not sound cheesy because your mind is seeing a Japanese dude trying to speak English, so if the actor mangles the accent a bit, who cares.
• If the actor playing the character is speaking English, but his character is actually speaking “X” in the movie, forget the accent and just let actor speak English. Jeez, we all know that the characters Craig and Schreiber are portraying are speaking Russian and not English with a cheesy accent, so lose the accent please.

This came up recently concerning Valkyrie, which I enjoyed much more than I thought I would. I realized that one of the main reasons was the Tom Cruise did not even try to do a cheesy German accent, which would have driven me up the wall and totally distracted from the move. Here is what he had to say in an interview:

On the lack of German accents in the film:
"You know, we spent a lot of time going back and forth over that. All of a sudden you're listening to people trying to put on accents and Bryan finally said, 'No, no, no.' Just tell the story. We don't want to do an accent movie, just try and find something neutral that won't distract from the story and the characters."

I had absolutely no trouble realizing that all the characters were actually speaking German, and I was spared the cheesy accents.

Your thoughts?