Americans aren’t big on subtitles. Just ask Helen Mirren. The Oscar winner was so excited to use her French skills for the first time on screen when she signed on to star as a haughty restaurateur in last year’s “The Hundred-Foot Journey,” only to find out that her French character would be speaking in accented English.
“The reality is that it’s a Disney movie,” Mirren told Hollywood Reporter at the time. “The other reality is that the vast American public will not accept films with subtitles. People in Ohio have to go and see the movie.”
She has a point. The scary thing is how that thinking can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Americans get stereotyped as a nation that refuses to read dialogue, so distributors shy away from bringing foreign-language films to the states and pretty soon Americans are left with little more than superhero movies and Oscar bait — safe stuff that doesn’t challenge us too much.
But Netflix is proving that subtitles can be painless and valuable. Its latest binge-worthy prestige drama, “Narcos,” follows cops and kingpins during the rise of the big cocaine cartels in 1980s Colombia. You won’t see Pablo Escobar ordering around his minions in accented English; that would be ridiculous. He and all the other Latino characters speak Spanish.
But the show is clever about it. The subtitles are stealthily delivered, kind of like a parent furtively adding butternut squash to the mac and cheese.
First of all, there’s the marketing. Those coming to the show might think the story focuses mainly on the narrator, who is the very American-looking Boyd Holbrook.
Holbrook plays American DEA agent Steve Murphy. He spends considerable amounts of time explaining in voiceover how Escobar transitioned from being a relatively small-scale electronics smuggler to being the man in charge of a massive, lucrative empire. The narration is pretty heavily front-loaded, and all the confusing background information is in English.
In episode one, the first time we see a character speak in Spanish, it’s a one-sided conversation of one of Escobar’s men on the phone, and what he says isn’t all that important. What really matters is that American lawmen have tapped the guy’s phone.
But television still has to be smart about the way it handles risks. As with “Orange Is the New Black,”
the most interesting characters on “Narcos” aren’t the supposed face of the series, Steve, but all the people around him.
