'Black Mass,' 'Good Will Hunting,' and the Best and Worst Boston Accents in Movies

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Boston is home to one of America’s most recognizable regional accents, and every few years, a squadron of A-list actors descends upon Beantown in an effort to respectably imitate the city’s famously nasal and r-dropping pronunciations. Needless to say, some actors are much better at mastering the accent than others — though often only Boston natives and experts like professor John McCarthy, dean of the graduate school at UMass Amherst and an expert on linguistics, can tell the difference.

The biopic/crime drama Black Mass, which opened last week, is Hollywood’s latest attempt to capture the aural idiosyncrasies of the Bay State. Star Johnny Depp went through hours of prosthetic makeup to look like the brutal mob boss Whitey Bulger, but as far as McCarthy is concerned, the most authentic and transformative vocal performance belonged to his co-star Joel Edgerton. As disgraced FBI agent John Connolly, the 41-year-old Australian actor nails the city’s working-class wheeze.

“One thing he got really right is that there’s a kind of nasal quality to Boston accents,” McCarthy told Yahoo Movies this week. “He did that quite well. The way Edgerton says informants, Winter Hill Boys, and North End was all very well done. Plus, the way he said, ‘hear,’ meaning listen. He got all that right.”

McCarthy was also impressed by Benedict Cumberbatch, the British actor who plays Billy Bulger, Whitey’s powerful politician brother (and a former UMass chancellor, who McCarthy often heard speak). McCarthy suggests that actors who hail from countries with dialects in which the r is dropped have an advantage over their American counterparts.

“Another feature of the Boston dialect is the way words that are spelled with an ‘or’ are pronounced, and this is tricky,” McCarthy said. “It varies. Some words, like pork, are pronounced ‘pork,’ with the r, but fork is sometimes pronounced ‘fawhk.’”

Dropping the r from the middle or end of a word is the most recognizable element of the accent — see the oft-repeated (and mocked) phrase, “Pahk tha cah in Hahvahd Yahd” — but it’s not a magic bullet, or even something that gets applied all the time.

In The Fighter, Christian Bale nailed the squirrelly Lowell yap, which McCarthy called “very convincing.” Bale, who won an Oscar for the role, “got the overall sound of the dialect exactly right” and aced the difficult task (especially for a Brit) of keeping the r more pronounced in the word girl during this scene with Amy Adams:

Bale also aced the difficult test of correctly pronouncing the letter a in the middle of words.

“The thing nobody is aware of, but is crucial, is the vowel in words like John or Dog or God. In eastern Mass, those words all have the vowel ‘aww,’” McCarthy explained. “The thing I was listening for in Cumberbatch [in Black Mass] was what kind of vowel he put in the word John, and that sounded right to me. That’s a mistake a lot of actors can make. They end up saying ‘Jahn.’ They’re not well coached, necessarily, on that business of ‘aww’ versus ‘ahh.’”

This distinction is not just a regional one; in Boston, class often dictates the way words are pronounced. Whether a local pronounces vowels as “aww” or “ahh” — or whether they emphasize and elongate the a in a word like path — is often determined by their upbringing and family roots. Pronouncing path like a British person — “pahth,” with a broad a — is a feature of the old Brahmin accent, which was passed down by wealthy families who trace their roots back to the Mayflower and other early English settlers, McCarthy explained.

Billy Bulger may have risen up through society and lost some of the most extreme elements of his accent along the way, but his Southie roots showed when he said “Jawn” in his conversation with John Connolly.

The Brahmin accent is actually in decline, thanks to the disappearance of centuries’ worth of cloistered wealth, but it’s still a useful way for movies and TV shows to quickly establish a character’s backstory and bona fides. To illustrate the difference between the two dialects in his classes, McCarthy often uses a scene from the 1997 drama Good Will Hunting, in which Matt Damon’s working-class Will squares off against George Plimpton’s upper-crust, Brahmin-born psychologist:

Damon and co-star/writer Ben Affleck, who plays the almost cartoonish Bostonian Chuckie, “are perfect” in their accents, McCarthy says. They’re local boys, so it makes some measure of sense that they’d nail it, but they were also able to modulate their voices to mimic a different kind of Bostonian.

“They shifted out of their class,” he said. “They’re not working-class kids from Cambridge. They come from much more prosperous families. They hung around them and heard them, though, so they’re familiar with the accent of the class they’re portraying in that movie.”

Robin Williams, who won an Oscar for his role as Damon’s mentor in that film, put in a touching performance that nonetheless strained credulity with Boston natives. To understand why, check out this scene, in which Williams dresses down Damon for thinking his intellect could possibly substitute for real-life experience.

“[In the line] ‘Y’know what occurred to me,’ he’s overdoing it, trying to drop the r in occurred,” McCarthy notes. “But Bostonians don’t drop the stressed syllabic r unless they’re Brahmins, and he’s certainly not one … And [he uses] the standard English a” — which rhymes with cat — “rather than the broad a when he says, ‘I spent half the night thinking about it.’”

Also earning working-class street cred: The Town’s writer-director Ben Affleck and his co-star Jeremy Renner, who earned an Oscar nomination for the role. Notice Affleck’s pronunciation of rearview and Florida here:

Additionally, McCarthy gave top marks to another Boston-born star, Mark Wahlberg, for his aggressive Southie bark in The Departed. He also singled out Leonardo DiCaprio’s effort to blend different aspects of the Boston accent for his portrayal of an undercover detective in Scorsese’s Oscar-winning 2006 crime drama.

“One of the points of the scene is the ambiguity of DiCaprio’s class origins,” he said. “This is handled well: His accent does not have the working-class overtones of Wahlberg’s, but still, it’s more or less the right regional accent.”

Less impressive to McCarthy were Martin Sheen and Alec Baldwin’s attempts to sound like Boston cops in The Departed; the actors, he said, were relying too heavily on pastiche. “One of the problems with Sheen and Baldwin in The Departed is they were channeling the Kennedys way too much,” he said.

Beside the fact that the Kennedys’ accent was so distinctive, they also straddled the line between the rich upper crust and their less prosperous roots. Descending from Irish immigrants, not old-money English settlers, the Kennedys got rich in the early 1900s and were well educated, but did not have every Brahmin inflection. Channeling their specific version of the accent — unless you’re starring in a Teddy Kennedy biopic — creates a character that could not actually exist in the real world.

Still, says McCarthy, if you’re researching how to do the best Beantown accent, the city’s political scene isn’t a bad place to start. “The best place to hear accents being pronounced authentically is C-Span,” he say, “because those guys live and die by their ability to remain connected.”