It has been noted by many that making a film about writing
can be very difficult to pull off because the act, in and of itself, isn’t very
cinematic. “The Words”, a romantic drama starring Bradley Cooper and Zoe
Saldana, struggles with this very issue within the entirety of its running
time, but rather than trying to find creative ways to keep things dynamic,
instead it grinds its heels in the dirt, expecting the audience to drop their
guard and go along with this sterile, meandering story-within-a-story-within-a-story. Normally I could be sympathetic to this type
of risk taking in cinema…that is if this movie hadn’t been so belligerently
boring.
This
directing debut by Lee Sternthal and Brain Klugman thoroughly explores and fetishizes
writing; writing as a process, as a lifestyle and as an art form. The plot is
split into three separate narrative timelines and each layer focuses on a
separate love story. But ultimately, like its writer characters (who are
incessantly narrating the film within an inch of its life) this movie spends
far too much time telling and not showing.
The first
layer consists of an aged writer named Clay Hammond (Dennis Quaid) doing a
reading of his latest novel for a large class of grad students. There, a
would-be extramarital lover (Olivia Wilde) is sitting in, waiting for her
chance to pounce.
The
predominate plot is detailed within the book that Quaid’s character is reading,
a story about a young struggling writer named Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper) who moves
to New York, where he is unsuccessfully trying to get his first novel published.
After him and his supportive wife (Zoe Saldana) are married, they take a trip
to Paris, where Rory finds an old manuscript for a novel that he decides to
publish as his own. After doing so, his
career is magically transformed and he becomes an overnight literary
celebrity. Soon he is confronted by an
old mysterious man (Jeremy Irons) who tells him that he was the original writer.
Because this movie wasn’t convoluted enough, we then enter a third level that
takes place in Irons flashback, in which he then goes on and on about his lost
love in World War II. Are you following
any of this? If you’re not, I don’t
blame you.
I can
easily say that I haven’t seen this kind of pig’s ear of a screenplay since
last year’s “Sucker Punch”. Each
plotline is less interesting than the last and as soon as you find yourself
begging for the movie to get the point, it decides to embark on yet another aimless
digression. The multiple framing devices
serve no final purpose and the supposed endgame to all of this narrative
tilt-a-whirling is absolutely bewildering and cumbersome.
Cooper,
Saldana and company, including the now-rarely seen Jeremy Irons, are all doing
their best to carry this dead dog of a movie through to the ending, but minutes
seem to stretch into hours, as you pass many identical scenes of couples
kissing, writers typing and people reading.
The pacing is inconsistent and the dreary score seems to be working hard
to lull you into a daze, hopefully putting you to sleep, where you can escape the film’s own pretentious
self-satisfaction.
The
only credit I can give to “The Words” is that it looks good. The cinematography by Antonio Calvache is
presented with obvious craft and an attention to detail. However, without any
hesitation, I beg any reader interested to avoid this unmitigated, tangential,
yawn of a film.
Grade: D -
Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2012
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