Not half as bad as many critics have complained, but the constant whitewashing of the setting borders on the ridiculous: British people (or Americans with bad British accents) are just not Persians, and it’s honestly kind of offensive to try and pretend otherwise, which serves to ruin an otherwise innocuous two-hour bit of entertaining pointlessness.
Related Articles
36 users responded in this post
All that stuff about how American support for the Shah led to the Islamic Revolution felt a bit forced, I think. Ahmadinejad made for a surprisingly good tragic villain, though.
– and Ben Kingsley was really miscast as the Ayatollah. The beard never felt convincing.
Gyllenhall I can almost see passing. But Gemma Arterton is a pale-skinned redhead and bronzing her up just looks bad.
Yeah, they really should have grabbed some actress from Bollywood for Farah.
And then we’ve got The Last Airbender coming in a few weeks to compound the problem.
Maybe Tyler Perry could help?
That is really stretching the definition of “single-sentence.”
So are you saying that when India makes their Superman and Spider-Man movies they shouldn’t hire Tamil speakers but Bengali ones instead?
In (a possibly weak) defense of the film, the original source material did give both the Prince and Farah English accents, presumably to imply upper-class-ness.
I haven’t seen the film yet, though, so I don’t know how valid that is.
@PaulW: No. Because they’re making movies where the main character is Indian. When using a character who IN THE STORY YOU’RE TELLING is non-white, maybe use a non-white actor…
JG doesn’t look Persian at all, but he looks pretty much exactly like the prince in the game.
Some persians are very fair skinned. Seems a fairly ‘eh’ point.
I can live with the cast. I just wished the producers had ditched Mike Newell as director and gone with Abbas Kiarostami instead.
@sebmojo: Fair-skinned Persian =/= white dude.
@karellan: Jake Gyllenhaal looking like the box art’s Prince is not adequate justification for the movie’s whitewashing. If the game itself is also whitewashed, then adaptations provide the opportunity to improve upon that. Instead, the movie took the cheap and lazy route and cast a white dude as a Persian prince.
@Andrew Jeanes: Consider the possibility that the whitewashed cast you can live with is a reason why an Iranian director would not want to touch this film.
I remain perplexed by the notion that casting Gyllenhall is patently ridiculous whereas casting, I dunno, Adrian Pasdar* would’ve been cool. I’m biased; the story of my life is one of people cocking their head and either saying: “You look like you’re … something, but I’m not sure what – what are you?” or confidently declaring that I’m [whatever] and in fact look just like their cousin from [wherever]. So while I don’t look like every Iranian, or maybe even lots of Iranians, I definitely look like some Iranians; also some Arabs, some Indians, some North Africans, some Hispanic people, some southern European types, and some northern European types. There’s a massive degree of overlap between what all these people “look like”.
* Pasdar seems to be half-Iranian, along with apparently every other western-raised Iranian person I can name off the top of my head (Andre Agassi, Christiane Amanpour).
I mean, lots of English/German people “couldn’t pass” as Italians, and vice versa, but is anyone troubled that Marlon Brando wasn’t Italian? Or that Robert De Niro is only a quarter Italian?
Adrian Pasdar is indeed half-Persian. He went to my high school, and his father worked with my mother.
He’s also very, very short.
I might be crazy but weren’t ancient egyptian/persians a different race than people who currently live in those geographic areas. Before the Arabs kicked their butt and what have you. But then I always get a kick out of modern italians declaring they’re the descendants of the Roman Empire and not just a bunch of Lombard Pig Farmers who wandered down from the alps.
I just didn’t like JG in this because he doesn’t smoulder well. Doesn’t click for me. And he looks ridiculous with stubble.
The reason nobody complains about Brando or De Niro is A) decades ago and B) people make more than one movie a year about people generally described as “white.” How many other films will be about “Persians” and not involve terrorism in some fashion?
Matt D: You are crazy. First or all, Persians are not Egyptians. Second, Persians have been living in Iran, and speaking Pharsi (or a version therof) for at least 4000-odd years. (Egyptians are a somewhat different story — it’s true that Arabic became the main language after the Muslim conquest — but even in Egypt there was never a wholesale replacement of the population.)
I didn’t mean to put them together like that. I just meant it was the same for both ancient Egyptians as it was for ancient Persians. I think I was thinking more Phoenicians anyway. Now that I think about it.
Lindsey –
I agree that these sorts of argument have a lot of weight as a systemic critique. If we go back not that many years to a point in time when there weren’t many roles available for African American actors outside of a few stock character types, you could very fairly point to Hollywood as a whole and say “Hey, this is a huge embarassing problem; there hasn’t been a mainstream drama with a heroic black male lead in the however many years since the last time Sidney Poitier was a headliner.” (I remember being a kid and reading/hearing about what a revolutionary star Denzel Washington was, because he could get cast in roles where his being black was irrelevant. Which, given that I was a kid thirty years after the Civil Rights movement, is incredibly sad.) So you could point at a slate of summer blockbusters and fairly say: “Hey, none of these stars a black actor, that’s offensive,” whereas it would be difficult to mount a meaningful critique of any one film for not having an African American lead.
So analyzing the problem is compounded by your point that Hollywood isn’t cranking out a lot of movies with ancient Persians. In fact, I’m pretty sure the only Hollywood movies with ancient Persians from the last ten years have been this flick and 300, and without having seen either one I’m going to bet that the portrayal in 300 is way more offensive. On the other hand, Hollywood is probably correct that, movies succeed because of what they’re about and not how good they are, there isn’t a big market in the US (or Europe and Japan) for film set in either ancient Persia or modern Iran, so there’s no particularly good reason to make them with greater frequency. And if you want to be careful to only cast people who are ethnic Iranians to play Iranians, practicality dictates that you’re basically looking not at all the Iranians in the world, but all the Iranians and Iranian-Americans in the US and UK. Per Wikipedia, there’s about 450K such individuals (throw in ethnic Persians not from modern day Iran and we maybe get another few 100K?), only a certain fraction of whom are the right age, gender, and attractiveness to headline an adventure movie called Prince of Persia. Now how many of those people are even trying to be actors, let alone any good at it? It’s not a big talent pool. So you’re probably not going to cast an ethnic Iranian unless you really believe in Adrian Pasdar (of course, you could round out the cast with Sarah Shahi and Catherine Bell, and maybe should have).
Which leads back around to the question of who, exactly, is sufficiently “not-white” (for certain values of “white”) to be acceptable as an Iranian? Isn’t just saying “it should’ve been someone not-white, but it’s irrelevant which not-white” offensive in its own right? The ethnic distinctions between Indians and Arabs and Iranians are just as real (and just as fake) as the distinctions between Europeans and Iranians, and in my experience not particularly fungible to the Iranians I’ve known, who tend to be especially prickly about Not Being Arabs.
The British accent thing is totally dumb, though.
(1) Sorry for posting immediately after posting.
(2) In the second paragraph, I meant to write: “Hollywood is probably correct that, to the extent that movies succeed because of…”
(3) I didn’t realize my comment got so big. But I think this is an interesting question because I’ve observed a lot of people having the same superficial reaction, yet I haven’t seen anywhere that someone has expanded on what exactly would and wouldn’t be OK in a way that I didn’t think betrayed some ignorance. (I.e., someone commenting on another website was like “What about Oded Fehr! He’s a great actor!” Which he is. But if casting a half-Swedish/half-Jewish guy as the “Prince of Persia” is supposed to be offensive, I’m sure casting an Israeli in the same role wouldn’t bother anyone at all.)
Characterizing the reaction as “superficial” is kind of patronizing, honestly. It also isn’t solely about “ancient Persians” as such, but about “Hollywood never casts non-whites for anything major” in general, so yes, it IS offensive that there are no black dramatic leads. It isn’t ‘riot in the streets’ offensive, but it’s something worthy of comment.
The reason people complain about Prince of Persia specifically for not casting any actual Persians is…well I think the title makes that clear. Prince of Braveheart II can be all about Scotch-Irish types and nobody would call that racist except at the very high systematic level where Hollywood has failed to make an epic about Shaka Zulu or something similar.
Not being able to name a specific actor for the role doesn’t count as superficial either–I don’t keep track of a huge number of celebrities, but someone with seemingly some level of regional descent doesn’t seem like too high a bar to reach. For instance, a Kuwaiti would be fine, the half-Persian guy mentioned above somewhere, anyone besides Jake “descended from Swedish nobility, not Persian” Gyllenhaal would be fine. It’s a major role that seemed cut out to give some employment opportunity to somebody else, but instead they just hired the white guy again.
As well, films succeeding based on “what they’re about” has more to do with it being “about action sequences and swords and shit” than “about white people” though this one specifically is set outside the idealized white-medieval past so…they still cast white people?
This is the same problem that Airbender has, though Airbender managed to make it much worse by casting non-whites only as villains, and which many other movies have had–are we really not past having David Carradine play the lead in Kung Fu because we’re so afraid of Asians?
Lindsey –
I said “superficial” where perhaps I should have said “immediate” – my point was that the first-order reaction of “Gyllenhaal as a Persian? That’s ridiculous” is understandable, but I’m curious what the followup is. And I meant to make clear that generic criticism of Hollywood for not doing enough to serve non-white actors – and non-white stories – is something I’m on board with.
What really interests me is your second paragraph. Why would casting a hypothetical Kuwaiti be fine? If the generally agreed upon silliness of casting a Swedish dude is the first reaction, what’s the second – what’s really the issue? Is it (1) that they should have cast an actual Iranian, or something close enough? (2) that they should’ve seized the opportunity to cast someone, anyone, not of European descent, and didn’t? (i.e., would we be ok with the Maori actor Cliff Curtis, who’s nowhere close to Persian but has the same kind of “I know he’s … something, I just don’t know what” appearance that I do), or (3) is it that Gyllenhaal doesn’t meet some objective standard of “could pass for Persian ethnicity if required”? I took the problem people had to be a type-(1) problem – Gyllenhaal’s ancestors don’t come from anywhere close to Iran, but it sounds like your real concern is type-(2), in that confronted with a film where they really, really had no (non-commercial/mercenary) reason to cast a European-American, they did it anyway, and in that light it’s certainly another iteration of an ongoing and depressing problem.
Meh. If it’s ok to play “Hamlet” with black actors, or chinese actors, or whatever-that-isn’t-danish actors, it should totally be ok to play “Prince of Persia” with european actors.
Mikkel –
I don’t think that’s really the same thing. (I wonder if Hamlet has ever been played by a Dane in a non-Danish production, though!) I imagine most non-European Hamlets have been in the theater, where there’s a much higher level of suspension-of-disbelief about casting to begin with. Plus lots of productions of Shakespeare, especially in theater but also in film, either specifically move the action to a setting that’s neither Shakespearean nor in line with the source material, or intentionally have a very hazy sense of time/place. This is harder to pull off in movies, and definitely isn’t what they’re doing with Prince of Persia. I doubt we’ll see a film production of a Shakespeare play that’s explicitly done in a period setting that matches what Shakespeare had in mind with a black actor playing anybody but Othello.
So, to summarize…
– Making the VERY white king of Persia into a big scary black man because Persians are evil and dark and scary, as well as making the very UN-white Greeks pale as ivory (brown filter doesn’t count) for 300: good!
– Casting a man who looks like a paler version of a young Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the (ADOPTED) Prince of Persia even though he’s not of pure Pesian blood: an outrage!
I’m sorry, is the problem here that Hollywood isn’t racially sensitive enough, or that you can’t bear to think of people from the Middle-East as anything but evil brown devils?
The problem is that Hollywood made a rare movie about people from the Middle East that doesn’t portray them as evil brown devils, and then cast a white guy in the role, instead of letting an actual Persian portray them.
Excuse me, but whenever did I say that I thought 300 was good?
I would have cast Naveen Andrews.
When has the Prince of Persia ever, in any incarnation of the character, been portrayed as all the demonstrably non-white?
Didn’t the original DOS-game guy have blond hair and hot pink skin?
@Crom: Did you read anything about 300 when it came out? People were ALL OVER the overt “brown v. white” evil-goodness garbage.
Can I just say that the casting didn’t bother me in terms of skin color as much as the fact that Gylenhaal and Arterton shared zero chemistry, and never presented a viable romance? Also, the script sucked, the action scenes were snipped up so haphazardly it was nigh impossible to appreciate any of the (I’m sure) intense and difficult stunts, the CGI compositing was cheesy and unbelievable (on par with Outlander, which had 1/3 the budget, and miles behind District 9, which had 1/5th the budget), and there was little sense of continuity or cohesion throughout. AND SO GODDAMN YELLOW I THOUGHT SOMEONE PISSED IN MY EYES. Why did they pull that shit? The game wasn’t like that!
It’s especially bizarre considering the director’s pedigree: 4 Weddings and a Funeral (funny, well-directed actors), Donnie Brascoe (dramatic, tense, well-directed actors), and HP4 (best action of the series, best acting in the series at the time, well-paced).
And the cinematographer of English Patient? That movie looked great! How could this be such an affront to the visual cortex?
Mediocre to the extreme. And we can expect at least two more of them.
Oh, and another thing. What up with the hackneyed political allegories? Did anyone go to this movie to be reminded of topical issues?