The Summer of Anne: A Crisis, an Intervention
Or, Anne Hathaway's Commitment to a British Accent
I had another plan for this essay. I was going to talk about something else entirely, but now I have to put off my original plan because there’s a matter too urgent to leave unattended.
Anne Hathaway speaking in British.
It’s a crisis. It’s begging for an intervention. It’s happened too many times! Anne Hathaway is to British as Taylor Swift is to red wig as Lea Michele is to Fanny Brice as Lana del Ray is to Priscilla Presley! If Anne Hathaway sees an opportunity to play British — no matter how bad the quality of the script, no matter how bad (no offense) her British accent is — she will take it. Can it be understood? No. But will she keep going until it works? I’ve no doubt.
Look at Lea Michele. She waited impatiently for years to be cast in the lead role of Funny Girl on Broadway. She waited and waited until finally an opportunity dropped in her lap perfectly calibrated not only to deliver to her the role she’d been waiting for but to simultaneously cleanse her illiterate diva reputation. I have to assume that Lea Michele as Fanny is on Anne Hathaway’s vision board.
Anne Hathaway believes in the green light (her British accent), the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther …. And one fine morning —
One fine morning, an ordinary day — one that bears no obvious signs of ushering us into a future we ceased to believe exists — we will wake up to the premiere of Anne Hathaway’s Convincing British-Accent Movie. Hathaway will have her Gwyneth moment. Her Gillian Anderson moment. Her moment when someone says: she’s not British? She’s all the way American?
I believe that this moment will come because I believe that Anne Hathaway cannot give up British. Just like Taylor Swift cannot give up red wigs or lyrical references to The Great Gatsby1.
Anne Hathaway’s first British movie was Nicholas Nickleby (2002), wherein she plays a wispy damsel in need of saving. It’s the type of role that seemed natural for her for about a decade, given her start as the Princess of Genovia. But what’s weird about it is how unnatural the role feels on her. I think Anne Hathaway tends to play harsher characters better than nice ones. And this character is proof of that. I can’t remember her name, and it doesn’t really matter. She’s in the movie because good British boys in thick nineteenth-century novels need waif-y wives as a reward for being pillars of the community.
After Nickleby, Hathaway’s British ambitions remained literary. She plays Jane Austen herself in Becoming Jane (2007), a film that I enjoy but that also annoys me just a little bit. My annoyance stems primarily from the film’s implication that Jane Austen had never read (or heard of?) Henry Fielding until a boy (Tom LeFroy) recommended Tom Jones to her for sexual reasons. It’s sort of the late eighteenth-century equivalent of a boy giving a girl a Kurt Vonnegut novel. Like: thank you? Like, yes, I actually have heard of The Beatles. But anyway, apart from this and the other implication that Pride and Prejudice is loosely-autobiographical, manifestation fiction, it’s a sweet movie…Oh, and I forgot the epigraph. Apart from the whole Tom Jones thing, the Pride and Prejudice fan fic thing, and the epigraph that dramatically reveals that Tom LeFroy named his daughter Jane, as if that’s supposed to mean something, as if Jane wasn’t just one of the five names available to nice British girls at the time2 — apart from all that, it’s a nice movie.
Anyway, back to the accent. I guess it’s fine. It’s a more interesting role than the Nickleby wispy girl by leaps and bounds. Anne gets to be a bit prickly as Jane Austen, which is fun. It’s very important to me personally that everyone knows how wickedly bitchy Jane Austen could be. And I think Hathaway embodies that well, though the movie overall is maybe a bit too sweet and dreamy. And her accent is very the-most-talented-girl-in-your-highschool-theater-program.
Following her very fine and completely regionless accent as Jane Austen, Hathaway took on the role of Emma Morley in One Day (2011), performing an accent so bizarre that it ended her British career for almost a decade. I guess according to one review it’s a Yorkshire accent. Sometimes I thought maybe she was Scottish. But mostly I thought: couldn’t they have just let her be American? The story doesn’t really depend on her being British. And the accent is so bad that you almost can’t appreciate Hathaway’s performance as anything other than the bad accent. You are so distracted by the fact that that’s Anne Hathaway doing a bad accent, that you can’t notice whether the rest of the character is good.
Somehow, against all odds, The Hustle (a movie so atrocious that its 90-minute runtime feels twice as long) is probably her best British performance. It’s still the regionally non-specific, mouth-full-of-marbles British that Americans tend to do when they’re trying to sound fancy, but it does at least match the tone of the movie, which is … well, totally bonkers and so bad that I can’t believe it got made. In fact, it’s kind of an insult to movies and to every aspiring filmmaker who can’t get an extraordinary, or even mediocre, project greenlit that this movie did get made.
The characters are untethered from reality and untethered from anything that would even indicate sincere personality. The script is contradictory. And the ending is silly and not even in a fun way. Worst of all, the costumes and styling are just a blob of nothing to look at. At least in Ocean’s 8 the women are wearing garments that you want to look at. For some reason, Anne is constantly wearing silk jewel-tones over silk jewel-tones, which under other circumstances, I might love. But in these circumstances, it’s just ill-fitting drapery with no shape and no color story.
It’s a movie that screams August to me — August, being a month of the year that I hate and never enjoy — though it was actually released in May of 2019. I guess it was clever to release in early May given that it premiered just two weeks after Avengers: End Game, so no one saw it and no one remembered that it even happened.
That Meghan Trainor recorded a song called “Badass Woman” for this movie is all that you need to know about it.
And so we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past (a collection of strange movies and bad accents).
It’s been five years now, so I figure we must be due for another British Anne Hathaway, and I look forward to seeing which regional dialect Hathaway decides to explore next. Perhaps she revisits Jane Austen in the twilight of her life. I would be seated and present!
And who am I to throw stones? That final paragraph is still iconic to me. What can I say!
Think about it. How many real, actual eighteenth-century women or heroines are you aware of who aren’t named Elizabeth, Jane, Fanny, Mar(y)(ia), or Anne?
absolutely incredible and groundbreaking work here.