'Words' to Ignore

by Brett Parker

You know you just saw a bad movie when hours after leaving the theater, you damn near forgot that you even saw a movie in the first place.  Our ultimate hope for when we walk out of a theater is that we’ve just witnessed a film that either stirred our imaginations, challenged our emotions, or reaffirmed our confidence in life.  Even watching a bad movie can have unlikely merits.  Trash, as Quentin Tarantino wonderfully proves, can excite us and alert us to loony insights into the human condition.  Even awful movies can appall us enough to make us seek out great art with a stronger hunger.  Yet for a film to be so dull and lifeless that it instantly evaporates from our memories with little fuss may be the greatest cinematic sin of all.

Cinematic frivolity as dull non-entity is the ideal that comes to mind when regarding The Words, a drama about the literary world that isn’t terribly dramatic at all.  The central premise invites interest--a struggling writer steals a great work from another man and claims it as his own--but almost no effort is put into unearthing the deep emotions and moral complications inherently built into such a situation.  The filmmakers work quickly to tidy things up for a happy ending while neglecting grand dramatic potential that could’ve made this enterprise a lot more juicier.  The irony here is how a movie about literary greatness turns out to be such a worthless guide to the literary world.

As the film opens, we see a distinguished author named Clay Hammond (Dennis Quaid) as he begins to read his latest novel, The Words, for an eager audience, which includes a pretty admirer (Olivia Wilde).  We then see Hammond’s story visualized before us as we follow Rory (Bradley Cooper) an aspiring writer who’s struggling to come up with a novel that’ll catapult him into the big time.  With mounting debt and a lovely wife name Dora (Zoe Saldana) to support, Rory feels like his literary aspirations will die out if the muses don’t talk to him sooner than later.  On a trip to Paris, Rory finds an old leather briefcase in a thrift store and buys it.  He later discovers that a lost manuscript is hidden within the case.  The manuscript turns out to be a remarkable story about love, death, and loss in a post-World War II world.  The story is so magnificent that it gives Rory an idea: he’ll claim the manuscript as his own work and try to get it published under his name.

Not too long after, Rory gets the book published and it becomes an overnight sensation.  It receives endless critical acclaim from the New York literary scene and it tops the best-seller chart for weeks.  Rory seems to be enjoying his newfound fame until the fateful afternoon where he runs into an Old Man (Jeremy Irons) who claims that he is the true author of the manuscript.  He patiently explains how the story of the novel is based on his real life, and after telling a heartbreaking story from his past, the Old Man convinces Rory that all his claims are true.  Will this Old Man expose Rory for stealing his manuscript?  Will Rory’s guilt lead him to do the right thing, even if it tarnishes his career?

One of the main problems with the film is that the so-called “great novel” at the center of the plot isn’t much of a story to begin with.  It’s pretty much a tired Hemingway-knockoff that tells the kind of age-old “better to have loved than lost” tale that anyone reading this review can write in their sleep.  Much is made of this novel’s vivid imagery and grand prose, but the filmmakers never allow us to hear even a sentence from the book presumably because, like Rory, they can’t comprehend transcendent writing themselves.

Another major problem is the film’s framing device, in which the entire central story turns out to be a fictional story told by a third-person author.  This conceptual knockoff of The Hours proves to be pretty flimsy stuff and if you thought Rory’s dilemma was on shaky ground, then you’ll find Hammond’s situation downright laughable.  This narrative device is so blatantly pointless that any idiot can see that it’s simply a desperate ploy for creative profundity within a lightweight script.  Perhaps even first-time directors Brian Klugman and Lee Sternhal realized this halfway through, for whatever tension Hammond’s plot evokes is never resolved as it simply hangs there blowing in the wind.  What’s probably most offensive about all this is how it once again places Dennis Quaid in a sanitized and bloodless role.  Considering the smirking rascals and wily rogues he played in the beginning of his career, it’s hard to believe that this patron saint of bland everyman roles once felt cut from the same irreverent cloth as Jack Nicholson.  I’d give anything for Quaid to play a kinky villain or a boozing womanizer to get back to his puckish ways.

It’s rather jarring how the filmmakers blow past every strong dramatic opportunity like The Flash blowing through Disneyland.  Once the premise’s central dilemma is presented to us, dozens of questions pop into our heads that never get answered: how deep does Rory’s guilt run?  Could he truly stomach his deception for the rest of his career?  Does the old man harbor any deep desire to seek revenge on Rory?  Could he take legal action against him?  What kind of anguish does he feel over the theft of his own story?  How does Dora feel about living with an imposter?  Just how punishing would the repercussions be for Rory if his secret were publicly exposed?  These answers can only be nibbled at while making it impossible to sink our teeth into them any deeper.  The big idea the movie eventually gets at is how obsessing over great writing can distract one from truly experiencing life and love firsthand.  We have trouble buying this considering A) it’s a hell of a stretch, seeing as how most writers have proved that great writing and great living can compliment each other wonderfully, and B) the female characters aren’t fleshed out strongly enough to support the “life and love” side of that argument.  Zoe Saldana and Olivia Wilde are pretty and enjoyable actresses, but its an insult to their intelligence that they’re simply window dressing here when they could’ve been strong feminine figures to counterbalance the wounded egos of the male characters.

Whatever dignity this film has, it can be found in Jeremy Irons performance as the Old Man.  He takes this underwritten role and wrings every ounce of heartache and wistfulness he possibly can while attempting to bring some real feeling to a transparent film.  I don’t want to insult the thespian by saying he sleepwalks through the role, but rather point out that simple, lay-up acting can seem more alluring than it deserves to be when it comes from such a skilled pro like Irons.  And God bless Bradley Cooper, for everyone knows he’s too pretty to play the accepted idea of a struggling writer, but the surprising sincerity he carefully dishes out here sure does prove otherwise.  Perhaps I have sympathy for his character because I’ve met many such lunks in my life who wanted Hemingway’s glory but couldn’t begin to understand the pain and passion that went into it.

Perhaps The Words is such a bewildering failure because it’s rare to see a movie so dumb that celebrates something so intelligent.  Like Rory, its as if the filmmakers also worship great writing and are endlessly frustrated that they can’t concoct it themselves.  Perhaps if they focused more intently on what great writing truly means to them, and what it can say about our egos and our worldviews, they could’ve better developed this paper-thin story.  But all we can do now is just pick up a book by Hemingway or Fitzgerald and realize for ourselves what Klugman and Sternthal were trying to get at all along.