Richard Armitage, American hero?

[Note: edited for grammatical errors. Sheez.]

***

[Left: Richard Armitage as Gary in Into the Storm. My screencap from the second trailer.]

Joanna said something along these lines recently (meaning, I think, that we’d decided his American accent was convincing) and I found myself musing about what an American hero is. Is Gary Fuller (formerly Morris) an American hero?

Can Richard Armitage be an American hero?

I know that that term will mean something different to each of us, particularly those who observe the U.S. from the outside as opposed to the inside. Of course, for viewers in Italy or Germany and probably other places, not only the accent but Armitage’s voice in general is entirely erased as an aspect of their perceptions of the film, at least until they can get their hands on an original-version DVD. So they would be judging his Americanness based on some other criteria, I suppose. And, of course, as the accent issue reveals, there is no one “American,” especially for Americans. So I’d be asking, maybe if Gary is a convincing Oklahoman hero?

[Richard Armitage as Gary, looking especially heroic again, in Into the Storm.]

I realized after Joanna made her comment, that while it’s important to me that Richard Armitage gets the accent at least close to right — and in contrast to some viewers’ reactions to him not using his native accent, that fact has had absolutely no impact on Armitage’s appeal to me, at least in the stuff we’ve seen so far — still, the extent of Gary’s Americanness, and the tasks that Richard Armitage has to undertake to show us that — don’t begin or end with the accent. It’s an essential first step, as we learned with both Spooks and Strike Back, in which characters killed or damaged our suspension of disbelief with accent or dialect mistakes (Toby Stephens; and of course Genevieve O’Reilly) even though their more general mannerisms or attitudes seemed plausibly American. It’s a bit silly of me, only to wonder this now — whether Armitage can be a convincing American. Comparisons are odious, but I remember completely believing that Alan Rickman was a German in Die Hard, and then having my jaw drop in the scene where Hans Gruber runs into John McClane (Bruce Willis) in the bathroom and lets his clueless American hang out. Yeah, Rickman was laying it on a little thick, but I was impressed nonetheless.

[Left: More Richard Armitage as father heroism with Max Deacon and Nathan Kress in Into the Storm.]

So what is, exactly, a convincing American?

I remember learning in high school that the first character in American literature that can be fairly called an American hero is Natty Bumpo in The Leatherstocking Tales (1832-41). I despised The Deerslayer back then — one of perhaps three or four books in all of my education that I can honestly say I hated — and have never tried to reread it. (It’s oddly very popular in Germany.) But the teacher told us that an American protagonist was supposed to have certain qualities. If I recall correctly there were four, but at the moment I can only remember three — an American hero was supposed to be silent, alone, and a “murderer” (i.e., destructive of something). Maybe the fourth was uncivilized?

In any case, those are attributes of the character, not so much, or at least not necessarily, attributes of Armitage’s performance. As a widower, Gary is alone, for instance, and I suppose that the fact of the storm puts him in circumstances where it’s a challenge to remain civilized (although the vice principal of a school is more or less the officially stamped version of the representative of civilization). Steven Quale’s remark that Gary was supposed to be the principal but that Armitage negotiated him down to being the vice principal in order to put him into more conflict was interesting, seen from the perspective of potential definitions of heroism in general and American heroes in particular.

[More looking heroic on the part of Armitage.]

Or is there a way of acting American? I remember a German friend telling me once that he felt that Americans had a natural sense that they deserved to take up more physical space than other people. There was a tweet last night complaining about Americans wearing Nike athletic shoes to the theater. (I don’t know how the tweep knew the people in question were American, but I would agree that shoe standards are different in different parts of the world.) Is there some sort of physical carelessness to being American, a kind of bravado?

Anyway, I don’t know the answers to these questions, but of course I am now raising them about Richard Armitage and wondering how American he will seem to me when I finally get to see this film.

I feel like I have been waiting forever.

~ by Servetus on July 25, 2014.