The Words (2012)

There is a laundry list of things wrong with The Words, the new drama from first-time filmmakers Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal. First, it is a film built entirely on unbelievable coincidences. Second, it is so convinced of its own profundity that every second must be heavily slathered with a deathly serious musical score. However, one of the things that annoyed me most about The Words is that it’s always in a mysterious hurry. It lasts but 90 minutes, and in this time it burns through a solid 120-plus minutes of material at an alarmingly fast rate. The material is not wholly a lost cause, but Klugman and Sternthal don’t do any of the heavily lifting that’s required in order to earn the emotional wallop they think the story deserves. The Words claims to celebrate the power of the written word, but it plays like the CliffsNotes for something much more substantial.

Bradley Cooper is Rory Jansen, a struggling writer in New York City who is looking to break through, but he just can’t create the material that will earn him the big deal. He gets quite the break when he goes on a trip to Paris with his new wife (Zoe Saldana), and decides to buy a ridiculously old bag in some antique shop. When he gets home, he discovers that within the bag is a manuscript that is initially deemed by all who read it to be the Greatest Thing of All Time. Cooper decides to copy the manuscript verbatim and pass it off as his own, and—through a series of even more ridiculous coincidences—this leads to some potentially devastating consequences.

That’s a whole lot of silliness, but one of the film’s greatest miscalculations is the addition of a whole other layer: Cooper’s story is actually the plot of a book written by the famous and mysterious author Clay Hammond (Dennis Quaid). This plot, and the romance within between Quaid and Olivia Wilde, adds nothing to the film besides the possibility of one last (obvious) twist. Adding all these layers does not make the story inherently interesting. When nothing is done with them, it just makes it frustrating.

The Words would have been better off focusing all its attention on Cooper’s plight, and what happens when he meets a mysterious old man (Jeremy Irons) who knows a great deal about the book’s source material. If Klugman and Sternthal sunk their teeth into this story, developed the characters, and weren’t so eager to manipulate everything, they might have had something more believable, and thus impactful. Instead, The Words is entirely focused on getting to the next plot point as quickly as possible, and that instantly removes all credibility. They clearly have great affection for good writing, but they don’t quite understand what goes into it. No reasons are given for the one million coincidences found in this screenplay. They just happen, and we are expected to believe them unconditionally. Things eventually get so ridiculous that I was half expecting Irons to reveal that he was actually Cooper’s father. Considering the way this universe works, it would have made more sense than some other developments.

This is just an irksome movie from beginning to end, and it’s made worse by the obvious love it has for itself. It wouldn’t have been out of character for the film to suddenly break out a subtitle that read “THIS IS DEEP AND EMOTIONAL” every time there was a long pause or someone was holding back tears. Klugman, Sternthal and their cinematographer Antonio Calvache have a nice visual sense, but since everything else is so thin it can often add to the faux-pretentiousness that’s in the air from the opening shot. Few things annoy me more than a movie that feels as if it’s constantly patting itself on the back; particularly when this self-congratulatory tone is as unearned as it is here. I’ll deal with it if we’re talking about a genuinely creative filmmaker like a Quentin Tarantino, but this is no Tarantino. It’s barely even a Daldry.

I stand by my belief that a good movie could be made from this material, but The Words is still a few hundred drafts away from being that movie. Perhaps Klugman and Sternthal could have used some outside help on the screenplay, or perhaps a director that wasn’t them. There are signs that they could be fine filmmakers, but in between these brief flashes is a whole lot of nothing. Writing about writing is always a tricky proposition, because if your own writing is no good then you immediately lose a lot of your credibility. In the case of The Words, the flaws and holes are too numerous and too egregious to overlook.

Grade: C-