Mare of Easttown Accent Critique Week 2

It’s back to the harrowing murder case that’s eating up the residents of hardscrabble Berwyn who live within sight of all those oil refineries.

 

Kate Winslet’s accent continues to be strong, particularly with elongated “O” sounds. This week we got “Do you knoewe where she was goein?” and some other local vowels. For the first time, I heard “Being a single parent—that’s a shtruggle,” which gives me hope that I’ll hear “shtreet.” Winslet also does well with several other sounds, like “Put your gloves awn” and “I’m soewuh sawerry.” Her “alrieght” game is on point.

 

And did I hear Winslet say “owe’ny” for “only”? Extra credit!

 

Evan Peters was pretty impressive, too. I liked the “wool,” “hoepe” and “awlweys” coming from this detective from “the county” who solved that big case in Upper Darby.

 

Mare of Easttown continues to play fast and loose with location, with a sign at the police station saying “Easttown Township, Delaware County,” when of course it’s in Chester County (and those oil refinery shots from last week scream Marcus Hook). It’s mostly amusing to me at this point, like when Mare wants to search all the way out to Route 13. If she means Chester Pike, that’s a hell of a search area from Route 30.

 

Steve tells me the authors are a married couple, one from Aston and one from Berwyn, so they’re basing the show on both their hometowns. This makes a lot of sense to me and the setting does kind of look like Aston with the woodsy areas. (For all my nitpicking, this show is much better with local flavor than the ad I heard for some movie set in Upper Darby, renamed as “Darby Heights.” Pass. Changing the name just alienates me and I’m in the intended audience. My Dad grew up in Upper Darby in our plane of reality, so miss me with this “Darby Heights” nonsense.) So I can understand the choices they make for Mare of Easttown. Regardless of county, the overall atmosphere is very local so I’m just going to enjoy it. It’s also more fun to say “Delco” than “Chesco,” so I’m just going to keep labeling everything a Delco accent.

 

Some of the smaller characters are doing well with the Delco accent. Erin’s father did a great job with “doitter” when he was mourning his daughter. (It’s fun to laugh at accents when people are facing unthinkable tragedy!) Brianna is Delco as hell—like, they pulled this actress right of class at Prendie. In the police station, she slathered the line “Noepe, I want a loyer” with an accent thicker than Cheez Whiz, and I loved it. The father (?) of Erin’s baby also was very good with “wool” and “wanted tuh.”

 

For accents, the most bang for our buck came with that girl they interrogated who said the one word “Umm” with the entire weight of Delco—all 566,747 residents—in her voice. She has to be local. I wonder if a lot of the smaller parts were filled by local people. I read that a lot of actors can’t do our accent, so they might as well just hire some local people who can.

 

Anyway, beyond the accents, it’s a pretty good show. The scene where Mare was remembering her deceased son when talking to her grandson’s doctor was heartbreaking, and the script packed so much subtle, wordless information into it. I’m really enjoying this.