Sacre Bleu! European Critics Share Wrath for U.S. Actors in ‘Ferrari’ and ‘Napoleon’

Scott Roxborough
·3 min read
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Ridley Scott’s Napoleon and Michael Mann’s Ferrari are facing allegations — surprising for two films focused on straight white male protagonists — of cultural appropriation.

French and Italian critics have taken offense at the directors’ decisions to cast American actors to play national icons — Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon Bonaparte, the general who became French emperor, and Adam Driver as visionary Italian carmaker Enzo Ferrari — and, adding insult to injury, having them speak in English.

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“It’s original sin,” wrote a Ferrari reviewer for Italy’s Movieplayer magazine on the casting of Driver, alongside Spanish actor Penélope Cruz as Ferrari’s wife, Laura, and American Shailene Woodley as his mistress. “Not just to have them speak English, but with a dodgy Italian accent.”

“Deeply clumsy, unnatural and unintentionally funny” was French GQ’s assessment of the very French characters of Napoleon and his lover Josephine (played by Brit Vanessa Kirby) speaking en anglais.

“It’s culture appropriation,” fumed Italian star Pierfrancesco Favino (World War Z) in an interview with British newspaper The Telegraph, arguing that Mann could have easily cast one of his many esteemed Italian colleagues — “Toni Servillo, Adriano Giannini, Valerio Mastandrea” — to play Ferrari instead of a guy from San Diego. “If a Cuban can’t be a Mexican, why can an American be an Italian? [It] seems an attitude of contempt.”

Hollywood historization — taking a famous foreign figure from the past and getting an A-list star to play them in English — has a long, and award-winning, tradition, from Spartacus and Ben-Hur to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator.

But the issue of culturally appropriate casting is a hot-button topic, particularly during awards season. Non-Jewish actors Bradley Cooper (Maestro), Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer) and Helen Mirren (Golda) have all come under scrutiny for playing, respectively, composer Leonard Bernstein, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. What makes the Napoleon and Ferrari critiques new is that “here you have a bunch of white dudes playing other white dudes,” notes French film critic Yal Sadat, of Cahiers du cinéma.

There was a time when the argument held up that few European actors had the name recognition needed to carry a major historical epic, but the globalization of the film industry has thrown up a host of internationally bankable A-listers — think Jean Dujardin, Guillaume Canet and Mathieu Amalric in France, or Luca Marinelli and Riccardo Scamarcio (not to mention Favino) in Italy — giving directors little excuse to cast an American to play continental. Thus, many in Europe resent seeing their own history usurped and sold back to them with an American accent.

“Joaquin Phoenix as an English-speaking Napoleon doesn’t offend me,” says Sadat, who adds that it was worse suffering through Johnny Depp “trying, badly, to speak French” in Maïwenn’s period drama Jeanne du Barry. “But there is a sense of cultural superiority [to these films]. The idea that we still need big Hollywood to tell us our history is important.”

For most French and Italian audiences, who will see these films in dubbed versions, the point might be moot. Napoleon has earned a respectable $5 million at the French box office, and Ferrari, which bows Dec. 14 in Italy, is expected to do well.

“It’s a beautiful film but strange to watch in the original with all the characters speaking English [in] ridiculous Italian accents,” the reviewer for La Repubblica wrote of Ferrari. “Watch it dubbed. It’ll be much better.”

This story first appeared in the Dec. 7 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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