"The Words" is a movie about a writer writing about a writer who has stolen another writer's work about his life as a writer. It sounds cerebral on paper, but it's not, in practice. It's easy enough to follow, but the narratives are nesting dolls of decreasing value.
The Irons-narrated Paris scenes are by far the most engrossing; the story is about as deep as a supermarket page-turner, but it's easy to believe such a sepia-toned romance would make for a best-seller.
When The Princess Bride, for instance, used the device of the storyteller as narrator, it managed to interrupt and return to its stories playfully and charmingly. This film's layered storytelling lacks the fluidity, grace, or good humour, to pull off its conceit.
It's always dangerous ground to create a fictional work that centers on fictional artists who are revered geniuses of their craft. If you're going to make up a musician, a painter, a writer, then you have to be prepared to show their music, their paintings, their words. When it comes to Jansen's stolen best-seller, the film wisely only shows us obscure flashes of ink-stained manuscript, relying instead on Jeremy Irons' velvet-voiced narration to sell the image in a way that Hammond's stilted prose utterly fails to do.
Though flawed, the film is a promising debut from first-time directors Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal. Love went into the production -- there's care in the framing and cinematography, the scoring, the recurring visual motifs. A little romance takes the movie a long way.
But its romance can also rankle. Take, for instance, its representation of the struggling writer. There are no sleepless nights in drafty garrets, no dinners of ramen noodles, no piles of unpaid bills. Instead, there are handsomely outfitted New York lofts, tailored blazers and Paris honeymoons, all funded on an office mail clerk's salary, apparently.
In the end, the film's Achilles' heel is an unfortunate one for a serious-minded literary drama about writers - its screenplay.
The Irons-narrated Paris scenes are by far the most engrossing; the story is about as deep as a supermarket page-turner, but it's easy to believe such a sepia-toned romance would make for a best-seller.
When The Princess Bride, for instance, used the device of the storyteller as narrator, it managed to interrupt and return to its stories playfully and charmingly. This film's layered storytelling lacks the fluidity, grace, or good humour, to pull off its conceit.
It's always dangerous ground to create a fictional work that centers on fictional artists who are revered geniuses of their craft. If you're going to make up a musician, a painter, a writer, then you have to be prepared to show their music, their paintings, their words. When it comes to Jansen's stolen best-seller, the film wisely only shows us obscure flashes of ink-stained manuscript, relying instead on Jeremy Irons' velvet-voiced narration to sell the image in a way that Hammond's stilted prose utterly fails to do.
Though flawed, the film is a promising debut from first-time directors Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal. Love went into the production -- there's care in the framing and cinematography, the scoring, the recurring visual motifs. A little romance takes the movie a long way.
But its romance can also rankle. Take, for instance, its representation of the struggling writer. There are no sleepless nights in drafty garrets, no dinners of ramen noodles, no piles of unpaid bills. Instead, there are handsomely outfitted New York lofts, tailored blazers and Paris honeymoons, all funded on an office mail clerk's salary, apparently.
In the end, the film's Achilles' heel is an unfortunate one for a serious-minded literary drama about writers - its screenplay.