No Mainers’ accents in ‘Empire Falls’

LEWISTON – Actors who try to mimic a Maine accent often get it wrong – talking too slowly, wheezing through dialogue and generally sounding dumb.

So perhaps it’s good news that none of the stars cast in the HBO adaptation of Richard Russo’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “Empire Falls,” will affect the accent.

The film’s cast is studded with Oscar winners Paul Newman, Helen Hunt and Ed Harris. But other talented actors have tried the accent and ended up producing caricatures, said Jess Platt, a dialogue coach who worked with Michael Caine on “The Cider House Rules.”

Caine won an Oscar in 2000 for the role of Dr. Larch in that film. Platt helped the actor hide his English accent and sprinkle his speech with understated New Englandisms.

Moviegoers will remember Caine’s lilting delivery of this line: “Good night, you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.”

“I didn’t want people saying hahd instead of hard,” Platt said.

But Caine’s delivery may have been a rare exception. Poor accents sound overripe to native Mainers and “obnoxious” to everyone else, Platt said.

“It’s just not real,” said Platt from his home in California. “That dialect has lots of specific sounds that you people would recognize.”

Lea Girardin, director of the Maine Film Office, said she’s winced at some affected accents, even in otherwise good productions like the Stephen King miniseries “Storm of the Century.”

The worst example was Vincent Price in “The Whales of August,” Girardin said, when the actor combined a Maine accent with his creepy B-movie villain voice.

Though part of her job is to help people make movies in Maine, Girardin has never been asked for help on the accent.

“Getting the sound right is hard,” she said.

Today most Mainers don’t have the accent, which was why “Empire Falls” director Fred Schepisi decided not to ask actors to affect it.

Schepisi, the Australian director of “Roxanne” and “A Cry in the Dark,” spent time in local restaurants and bars and found that people sounded like anyone in middle America.

“You just don’t hear the accent much anymore,” said Dee Cooke, a native Mainer who is a casting consultant on the film.