SPEAK UP!

Cinema has been infected by too much mumbling

Ten years ago, Tom Hardy boarded an airplane and gurgled his way into blockbuster history. In July 2012, cinemagoers were introduced to Bane, the Batman villain Hardy portrayed as a mountain of muscle and incoherence.

His big entrance in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises was during a mid-air heist, where he declared, “Who we are does not matter. What matters is our plan.” Or, as audiences around the globe heard it, over the whoosh of jet engines and the munch of popcorn: “wooohwedossswhattmersplannnn.”

Hardy was staking his claim as a superhero baddie. He was also making a case for mumbling as high dramatic art. Since then he's scarcely paused for breath — as we were reminded when he burbled his way through a cameo as Alfie Solomons in the final episode of British series Peaky Blinders.

Alfie was a Jewish gangster with a dapper top hat. “Aaarghhh,” said Hardy to Cillian Murphy's character, Tommy Shelby. “Heugggh ...” Murphy, beneath his flat cap, glared in incomprehension. It was not 100 per cent apparent that he was acting.

Those two performances constituted twin summits in Hardy's war on intelligible dialogue. One that has earned him a rare distinction: a new survey (from Preply, a language-learning app and e-learning platform) reveals he is the actor Americans find hardest to understand — and is most likely to have them using the subtitle button.

Hardy will be chuffed to discover that his influence has spread. While he tends to play loners on screen — whether a rambling road warrior in Mad Max: Fury Road or a spitballing Spitfire pilot in Nolan's Dunkirk — as an actor, he's surfing the zeitgeist.

Mumbling is a proud cinematic tradition. It bound up in the cult of the method actor, as originated by Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski and introduced to the United States by influential teacher Stella Adler. Her students included Marlon Brando, who pioneered the “method mumble” in 1954's On the Waterfront (“icouldbeenacontenda”). His influence would later seep into popcorn cinema — for example, Sylvester Stallone crying out “Adriannnnnn” in Rocky. But Hardy has reinvented it for a new generation.

This “nu-mumble” has penetrated every facet of mainstream entertainment. And if Hardy is the viscount of verbal incontinence, then Robert Pattinson is the crown prince. There's even a Batman connection — with Pattinson's reimagined Dark Knight from Matt Reeves's The Batman spending most of his recent bigscreen outing talking into his cowl.

Pattinson did likewise in another Christopher Nolan film, Tenet, where the twisty time-travel plot was surpassed by the unintelligible delivery of the actor and his co-star John David Washington.

Yet in the early 21st century, The Hollywood Mumble seemed to have gone underground. Through the early 2000s, the vogue in American independent cinema was “mumblecore,” where directors such as Noah Baumbach and Joe Swanberg encouraged stars such as Greta Gerwig and Olivia Wilde to mumble their dialogue.

These were tales of everyday people, speaking as if at the bottom of a deep well with iffy acoustics. Yet mumbling has come roaring back — and is also ubiquitous on television.

With the BBC'S 2014 adaptation of Jamaica Inn, it was impossible to work out what anyone was saying. (Similar charges were levelled at crime drama Happy Valley.) Such was the outcry around mumbling in many of the broadcaster's dramas, that in 2013, BBC boss Tony Hall set out what was tantamount to a mission statement against mumbling: “Muttering can be testing (when viewers find they) have missed a line ... you have to remember that you have an audience.”

Things have not improved in the years since. The contrast between today's muddy dialogue and the whip-smart repartee of classic Tinseltown is scalpel-sharp. On social media recently a blooper reel culled from the Golden Age of Hollywood has been doing the rounds.

“Oh you're following me?” says Jimmy Stewart as he notices the camera tracking him as he walks out of frame. “Goddamn,” says Barbara Stanwyck in another blooper. The reel shows that, even speaking off the cuff, the stars of Old Hollywood knew how to deliver a line.

As is often the case with unwelcome fads, things are likely to get worse before they get better. Colin Farrell's late career has been a cornucopia of crawing into his cuffs — whether in True Detective or last year's The North Water. And what of Johnny Depp, whose Captain Jack Sparrow corkscrewed from a decent Keith Richards impersonation to ghastly gibbering and grousing?

Driving the fad is a quest for “realism.”

Directors increasingly believe hard-to-understand dialogue is a mark of authenticity. In an interview last year with London Daily Telegraph, Simon Clark, chairman of the Institute of Professional Sound and head of production sound recording at the National Film and TV School, said the directorial trend “is referred to as `realism' by people who are in favour of it, and as `unintelligible' by technicians like me.”

He elaborated: “If somebody stands on a set and they mumble, I will make a perfect recording of that happening. Yes, I can make it louder, but if a performer doesn't make themselves clear I'm afraid there's nothing I can do about that.”

Hardy's performance as Bane was regarded as deeply odd in 2012. Today, it is bang on trend. We sit down to our favourite streaming shows or take our cinema seats half expecting a mishmash of mumbles. Having once sold us a glamorous glitter-strewn version of reality, it feels that today Hollywood wants to take us to a space where, even if they could hear you scream, they probably couldn't work out what you were saying.