It must be disconcerting for acting students learning how to enunciate properly to see the top honor in their profession go to performers doing the exact opposite. Three of the five best actor nominees this year -- Terrence Howard in "Hustle and Flow," Heath Ledger in "Brokeback Mountain" and the winner, Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Capote" -- gave performances in which their dialogue was, at times, barely audible.
Making the case for this trend is complicated, because lack of enunciation is closely interlinked with another, more oft-proven Oscar bias -- mental disability. One might argue, for instance, that Oscar-nominated mumblers playing characters with disabilities, like Sean Penn in "I Am Sam," Billy Bob Thornton in "Sling Blade," Russell Crowe in "A Beautiful Mind" and Robert DeNiro in "Awakenings," should be discounted from this trend. But you might also argue that if, for whatever reason, the actor had used his normal voice, the performance would not have been Oscar-nominated or as highly-praised.
Plus, many other mumbling nominees have played characters unaffected by mental illness, such as Benicio Del Toro in "Traffic," Jamie Foxx in "Ray," Tim Robbins in "Mystic River," Dustin Hoffman's Robert Evans impersonation in "Wag the Dog," Johnny Depp's Keith Richards routine in "Pirates of the Caribbean," and of course, if we want to go back further, Marlon Brando in "The Godfather." Ray Charles was blind, but don't tell me Foxx's unintelligible jabbering had nothing to do with his Oscar.
This trend could lead to the same conclusion as the disability bias: Our deep dark secret is that no matter how many times we rave about a performance, our internal barometer of acting quality is, in fact, so bad that we need these incredibly salient signs to tip us off as to what's good.
But let's not jump to conclusions just yet. While judging a play, I rarely have a strong reaction to an actor's performance. I react more to the writing or the overall concept. But of the handful of performances that do stand out in my mind, many of them, such as Thornton in "Sling Blade," Crowe in "A Beautiful Mind," Mary-Louise Parker in the stage version of "Proof" and Robert Downey, Jr. in "Ally McBeal," involve some form of low-talking.
And Hoffman, Ledger and Howard deserve their nominations. Their whispy line readings not only add to their characters' eccentricity but put them at a distance from both the audience and the others around them. The lack of enunciation helps make their characters appear confident, mysterious and vulnerable -- required traits of any good performance.
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