The Rolling “R”

The sad truth about the real Russian accent is that it’s simply not as exotic, or indeed scary, as 99 percent of the Hollywood characters that require it. Much like there’s a distinctive “grape” candy flavor that is at once easily identifiable and entirely unrelated to the taste of real grapes, there’s a Russian accent and a Hollywood Russian accent; the latter is, if anything, a kind of Germanic blur. It’s best spoken just before stabbing the listener with a poisoned needle that springs out of your stiletto boot. Hailing a cab, not so much.

Perhaps that’s one reason that almost everybody on our list, with one notable exception, got here playing a non-villainous character. You may also notice that most of the performances are fairly recent. There’s an easy explanation for that, and it’s not our ignorance of old cinema. It’s that a well-tuned portrayal of, um, Russianness became possible only in the last 10 to 15 years, when the country ceased to be a hostile monolith in the eyes of the West and revealed itself to be populated by real people.

With that, we unveil the inaugural winners of the Rolling “R,” our prize for the best portrayals of Russians Hollywood has to offer. This issue’s lucky honorees should be receiving their awards, in a physical incarnation of some sort, at some point later this year — and won’t they be surprised! Feel free to nominate your own candidates for upcoming issues, or, if you’re a Hollywood actor looking to add an “R” to your award shelf, study these five performances closely.

4 & 5. Vanessa Redgrave and Maximilian Schell, Little Odessa (Fine Line, 1995)

James Gray’s debut feature, an intense and sometimes excessively tragic film (it ends with corpses piled higher than Hamlet come curtain time), gets nothing right about the Brighton Beach émigré scene. Even the characters’ last names are not quite there: Shustervich? Shapira? As the hero (a ruthless contract killer, natch), Tim Roth, in one of his first leading-man jobs, is a well-wrought character but about as Russian as Tony Blair. It’s left up to Redgrave and Schell, playing Roth’s parents, to ground the film in a visceral reality. Both turn in amazing performances, and both have had their own private insights into Russia. Redgrave had visited the country many times; as for Schell, his own wife, Russian actress Natalia Andreichenko, is right there in the film, playing his mistress.

3. Cate Blanchett, The Man Who Cried (Canal+, 2000)

A folly by the talented Sally Potter, this rather purple melodrama is the 48th film to feature Johnny Depp on a white horse (he’s a gypsy!) and makes a curious choice in casting lanky, squinty Russian superstar Oleg Yankovsky as Christina Ricci’s father. (Who was the mother, a French bulldog?) But then there’s Cate Blanchett, pre-fame, absolutely nailing her ten-minute turn as Muscovite bad girl Lola. Her character is so alive, so singular, that we’re willing to tolerate the drivel she’s trapped in; as for her accent, our sharper-eared friend swears that she’s even got a touch of the lower-class Moscow dialect in her few onscreen Russian phrases.

2. John Malkovich, Rounders (Miramax, 1998)

Teddy KGB, a tracksuited card shark tormenting Matt Damon (playing his trademark male ingenue with one extra-special talent) in this underground-poker potboiler, is a patently ridiculous concoction. First of all, there’s the matter of that painful handle. “Teddy” – what’s his real name, Fedya? And what kind of Russian gangster would be called “KGB” by his peers? Not buyin’ it. Still, when Malkovich opens his mouth, his usual louche villainy works so well with his Russian accent that you believe in this preposterous character immediately, as if he was your own evil uncle. The magic ebbs somewhat when Malkovich says a couple of words in actual Russian – his pronunciation, surprisingly, falters.

1. Nicole Kidman, Birthday Girl (FilmFour, 2001)

An easy winner, a bravura turn tucked into an inconspicuous movie. Birthday Girl is a modest comedy starring Ben Chaplin as a hapless English clerk, Nicole Kidman as his mail-order bride and two Frenchmen (no less than Mathieu Kassovitz and Vincent Cassel) as the Russian thugs that follow her into his life. It’s not a masterpiece and was probably never meant to be, with the exception of one aspect: Its creators went far beyond the call of duty when it came to cultural authenticity. In fact, the characters mouth a good dozen pages of well-written, phonetically memorized Russian dialogue. Cassel’s bratan, especially, is so well-coached he even slurs his “what” appropriately – it’s not the Russian 101 “Chto” or even the colloquial “Chevo,” but a gloriously déclassé “Chyooo?” But it’s Kidman who makes her character’s tentative English sing with a kind of comic poetry. While the default vodka-ad vamp would have been incalculably easier to nail (and 99 percent of the audience wouldn’t catch the difference), Kidman makes struggling with the diphthongs sexy: Her proprietary version of the accent is seductive without being predatory.

And now, as a bonus, the worst. Russian. Ever.

And now, as a bonus, the worst. Russian. Ever. To be sure, a bad accent is hard to separate from an overall lousy performance, and a lousy performance from an insulting one: for instance, I have no idea if Swede Peter Stormare had a good Russian accent in Armageddon or not; I was too dumbstruck by his role as it was written — a blotto Russian cosmonaut banging about the dilapidated space station, swatting at consoles with a hammer. As U.S.-produced ethnic vaudeville goes, this is roughly equivalent to outfitting a Hindu astronaut’s quarters with a Slurpee machine. But compared with the touchy Iranians or Kazakhs, we Russians are historically docile about these things. If the yardstick is pure awfulness, nothing can possibly beat Schwarzenegger in Red Heat, putting his constipated Austrian vowels to the service of such lines as “Soviet method is more economical” (said upon beating a confession out of a witness). But the worst Russian accent of all time belongs, drumroll, to a Russian – Alexis Chesnakov in the Carol Reed classic The Third Man.

Bear with me. It’s precisely the fact that the man is speaking his native tongue that makes his performance as the Red Army liaison, officer Brodsky, such a hoot. Chesnakov, you see, is clearly a White Russian, an émigré making ends meet by picking up small parts in Western movies – like the protagonist of Nabokov’s Mary, or like Nabokov himself at some point. Here, he has one line in Russian: “Comrade, arrest her.” But, like a true aristocrat, Chesnakov could not stoop to actually playing a Commie boor: The posh spin he puts on the word “arrest” is so absurd that, every time I hear it, I end up on the floor hiccupping with laughter. It’s like seeing David Hyde Pierce play Shaft.