If a picture is indeed worth a thousand words, this review would be just a selfie of yours truly looking sad and confused as the credits for «Words and Pictures» played in the background. Alas, I work in a medium driven by words, so to equal that picture, I’ve got 950 words to go.
Equating words and images is the major plot point of «Words and Pictures.» Two high school Honors program teachers oversee a student debate on which is more important, images or the written word. In the process, the teachers fall in love. It sounds like a romantic comedy with a little heft to it, until you discover that one teacher is so repellent that you root against the relationship. Adding insult to injury, the debate itself is given little screen time to develop.
«Words and Pictures» has a helmer I greatly admire, suitably cast actors I enjoy and a plot that sounds intriguing. Rom-coms are the hardest genre to employ without failure, but director Fred Schepisi made two successful ones: «I.Q.,» which I liked, and «Roxanne,» which I adore. Clive Owen had a roguish charm in «Duplicity» and Juliette Binoche provided what little convincing romance there was to be had in «The English Patient.» As a writer whose drawing skill makes Dr. Seuss look like Frank Miller, I was all set to root for words to win the big debate.
Unfortunately, «Words and Pictures» fails at portraying both titular nouns. The screenplay by Gerald Di Pego («Phenomenon») is full of subpar dialogue, one-dimensional characters, scenes that belong in a different movie, other scenes that belong in the trash, multiple rom-com sins of cliché and a warped, stalkerish notion of what constitutes romance. When the hero’s idea of a term of endearment to the heroine is «you cold-hearted ice bitch,» one wonders what he’d say if he were pissed at her.
Schepisi’s direction is completely devoid of his usual style. Slant Magazine’s Ed Gonzalez aptly describes it as «unexpected point-and-shoot hackwork.» Schepisi’s camera is as disinterested in these people as we are; there must be a dozen of the same overhead shots of Binoche painting with a janitor’s mop and an equal number of shots of Owen standing around and drinking from a lime-filled liquor glass. The classroom sequences are flat and static, even when Owen is screaming at his class to startle them. Even the climactic «battle» is shot for maximum blandness, which is appropriate for the big, misguided speech that accompanies it.
Artistic professions are always used by Hollywood as psychological shorthand. Owen’s English teacher, Jack Marcus, is a published writer, which automatically makes him an arrogant drunk. This is firmly in Owen’s wheelhouse—he did a good job playing Hemingway in HBO’s «Hemingway and Gelhorn»—but unlike Papa, Jack Marcus lacks any charm whatsoever. He’s pushy, rude, mean-spirited, a bully, a potential blackmailer and a plagiarist. When a character threatens to kick him in the family jewels, you hope she does. When he goes before the school board to fight for his job after numerous drunken incidents, his knight in shining armor is his debate opponent, Miss Delsanto (Binoche).
Miss Delsanto was transferred from another school. She’s a famous, successful painter, which automatically makes her aloof and cold. She constantly demands perfection without bothering to explain how her students can achieve it. She’s artistically tormented, as all movie painters are, but at least she has a valid excuse in the rheumatoid arthritis that has robbed much of her ability to paint. Marcus antagonizes her immediately, and the refreshment of Miss Delsanto’s original dismissal gives way to the tired old cliché of falling for the scraggly-looking drunken jackass character we’re supposed to love by default.
It’s Marcus’ idea to declare «war» on Delsanto’s art class, because she favors paintings over literature. He enlists his English class, some of whom are also in Miss Delsanto’s class, to assist him in this game. The concept of words vs. pictures is poorly executed, and without this debate, there should be no movie. Yet the movie exists for long passages without once paying lip-service to this aspect of the plot.
Instead, an unnecessary subplot regarding teenage sexual harassment draws an unintentional parallel between its disturbing harassment and the relationship between Marcus and Miss Delsanto. Marcus’ star pupil, Swint (Adam DiMarco) spends every waking moment trying to hook up with Miss Delsanto’s star pupil, Emily (Valerie Tian). He does this by relentlessly badgering her, calling her names like «dim sum» and other Asian stereotypes. (Is having a White character refer to an Asians as items off a Chinese take-out menu a new trend in screenwriting? STOP IT!) When, in a very effective scene, Emily screams in frustration to leave her alone, Swint resorts to drawing a dirty picture of her, which he then uses as a cyberbullying tool.
Was this supposed to be a point «scored» for pictures? Swint’s words were just as effective at creating torment. I questioned what I supposed to glean from this, until I saw Marcus’ reaction late in the film. When Marcus’ relationship with Miss Delsantos goes off the rails, as it must in a romantic comedy, he becomes as badgering and stalkerific as Swint. I doubt this was the filmmakers’ intention, but that’s how it played.
There is one element of this film that works very well. Marcus’ alcoholism has a major effect on his relationship with his son. Their conversations will hit home for anyone who has ever lived with an alcoholic. The looks of exasperation on Marcus’ son’s face rang true—they were feelings I knew well. But as good as these few scenes are, «Words and Pictures» can’t handle the shift in tone. It’s as if the projectionist at a double feature of «Days of Wine and Roses» and «To Sir, With Love» accidentally mixed up the reels.
But what about the debate, you ask? You’ll be asking that a lot during «Words and Pictures.» The answer is not worth the wait.
Odie Henderson
Odie «Odienator» Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here.
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Words and Pictures (2014)
Rated PG-13
for sexual material including nude sketches, language and some mature thematic material
111 minutes
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| May 23, 2014 |
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I’m sorry, but I find it difficult to believe that anyone — even teachers — talk the way that Jack Marcus (Clive Owen) and Dina Delsanto (Juliette Binoche) do in Words and Pictures. An alleged romantic comedy/drama from director Fred Schepisi — whose Six Degrees of Separation is long behind him at this point — Words and Pictures piles on mountains of pseudo-intellectual dialogue, a clutch of conflicts and subplots that go nowhere and a contrived “war” between two different art forms that is as vague as it is silly. And all this is in the service of a love story that wants to be both poignant and screwball and ends up just leaden.
When we meet Marcus, he is lambasting his students for their lack of interest in the power of the written word, while simultaneously drowning his own sorrows in drink: a one-time literary star, he hasn’t published anything in years, his relationship with his son is barely there and he is facing a performance review from a hostile school board. Enter Delsanto, a celebrated artist who is facing her own personal crisis in the form of rheumatoid arthritis that is crippling her ability to paint. The two get off to a typically acrimonious start, slinging insults back and forth, although it’s soon clear that Marcus is intrigued by the resistant artist.
Marcus decides that the way to fire up his students — and perhaps heat things up with Delsanto — is to declare a “war” between words and pictures that will determine which is better at communicating ideas and meaning. Although the whole school gets involved in the war, not much happens until the end of the film. It’s brought up in dialogue a lot (“But what about the war?”) while we sit through a series of contined skirmishes between Marcus and Delsanto as well as other random incidents that don’t do all that much to move the story forward.
The first problem with all this is that Marcus comes across as a boorish jerk. He’s rude, loud, condescending and just plain annoying, which makes it hard to feel any empathy — which we’re supposed to eventually feel — for him as his problems come to a head. One revelation late in the story does him no favors whatsoever and seems contrived to happen just so he can fall into another tailspin from which he must climb. Delsanto comes across as equally cranky, and when the romantic sparks eventually fly, it just doesn’t seem natural at all. Both Owen and Binoche are fine, fine actors, but their work here is overly forced.
The “war” itself between the written word and the painted image just seems pointless — why should there be a war at all? The ultimate contest revolves around Marcus’ students writing something inspired by a painting done by one of Delsanto’s students — which only means that the two art forms already complement each other. We need a whole movie to tell us that?
Other subplots come and go, such as a male student who wandered off the set of Dead Poets Society (from which this film borrows a lot) bullies a girl who resists his advances; the head of the school board is a woman (Amy Brenneman) with whom Marcus once had an affair. However, it seems more like time-fillers as we plod along toward the finale and pretend to care whether Marcus will save his job and/or crack Delsanto’s emotional armor. Even those resolutions seems perfunctory.
Schepisi’s direction eventually grows annoying: he’s constantly pushing in on the actor’s faces with the camera to give all this a sense of urgency and weight that simply isn’t there. Almost none of what happens in Words and Pictures feels believable. The drama is stiff and the humor almost non-existent. Neither the words nor the pictures can do much to make these characters and this story engaging.
Words and Pictures is out in limited release.
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Comedy-drama. Starring Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche. Directed by Fred Schepisi. (PG-13. 111 minutes.)
«Words and Pictures» is a strange one. It has some unusual, interesting elements, as well as other things that are simply off. Yet the ways in which it’s off are interesting, too.
The story is about a meeting of two personalities at a private prep school, a literature teacher and a well-known artist. Clive Owen plays the teacher, Jack, who is lively and mercurial but also skewed in personality. To be in his presence for more than a minute is to realize there is something wrong with him, that he’s loud and carries on, but he doesn’t connect. We soon realize that he is spiraling out of control from alcoholism. He’s not quite at the stage where he’s pouring vodka on his Wheaties, but he’s close.
Juliette Binoche is Dina, a famous painter who takes a job teaching art at the prep school because she needs to be close to family. She is suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, which is a rich character detail, and an unusual one, too. Characters in movies tend to be like household pets — either bursting with health or at death’s door. Here’s the rare case of someone on screen dealing with a serious, ongoing medical condition, in which the medical condition isn’t the whole story, just an aspect of life.
Jack immediately seizes on Dina as someone to tease, cajole and get a rise out of. She remains aloof but also vaguely interested, probably because he’s the only one in town who seems to have a pulse. Much of the movie concerns an obsession of Jack’s about the relative value of words and pictures. He asserts that literature is more important than visual art and tries to enlist Dina to take the other side of the argument.
This argument is bogus, in that there is no reason anyone needs to choose, but the movie, to its credit, seems to acknowledge that. It also makes clear to the audience that while Jack may be a poet of some small renown, Dina is an international talent, so comparing his words with her pictures might not be a fair fight anyway.
So the setup is odd: A raging alcoholic, with the wheels coming off the cart — a man who is the biggest noise in a small town — meets his match in a beautiful woman his own age, who is more successful than he is and at least as smart. Is the movie comparing his drunkenness with her illness? That parallel, if there is one, doesn’t make sense. Yet the movie traces their interaction pretty honestly, and there is something refreshing and unusual about a screen romance (of sorts) built around two 50-year-olds.
Binoche is remarkable, at least as beautiful as she was 25 years ago and radiant with substance and purpose. Just the scenes of her alone painting are mesmerizing, because Binoche leaves us in no doubt that Dina is a major artist, plugged into some authentic universal current. Maybe she is. It turns out those paintings are Binoche’s own.
Owen is fascinating in other ways. A movie like this usually depends on our belief that the hero’s recovery is possible, but Owen makes Jack into such a mess that he casts everything into the zone of ambiguity. Does Owen know this? Perhaps he does and is intentionally subverting the film. Or perhaps he and director Fred Schepisi both know this, and they’re intentionally subverting the screenplay. Or perhaps screenwriter Gerald Di Pego was in on it, too, and really wanted to write the most covertly feel-bad romance of the decade.
In any case, Owen makes Jack hopeless even when he’s not drinking — agitated, jumpy, smiling in the wrong places, and looking at Dina as if she’s just a substitute for a vodka bottle. Audiences will walk away thinking, «What was that?» But they will walk away thinking.
One of the more cutting sequences of satire from 2013 was a fake movie trailer from Don Jon, which featured a pair of notable Hollywood beautiful people mocking the kind of romantic comedies both had their share of experience in. Filled with the sort of exaggerated gestures and overwrought drama one expects from the genre, the parody was filleting an easy target. We all acknowledge the vapidity and shallowness inherent to what usually passes for a romcom these days, because we’ve accepted that as par for the course. At least they can’t get any worse, right? Not quite, as Words and Pictures proves that the only thing worse than an empty romantic comedy is a self-important one.
Clive Owen stars as Jack Marcus, an author, poet, and endlessly verbose honors literature teacher at a Pennsylvania prep school. Once a shining star of the town’s small, but incredibly well organized artistic community, Jack has gone to seed after too many years of pouring himself out into a tumbler of vodka instead of onto the page. It’s plenty clear how hard he’s hit creative rock bottom after we see him despondently delete a copy of his most recent work – not because we get to read the writing, mind you, but because the document itself is called “Poetry.” Truly, this man’s been tapped for all the creative juices he once had, but dammit if he doesn’t love his students, and they him, as evidenced by a rousing cheer of “we love you Mr. Marcus!” from the kids at recess.
Who better then to unclog his writer’s block than the school’s new hire, Dina Delsanto (Juliette Binoche), a frigid but feisty art teacher who also happens to be a former giant in her respective field. Debilitated by rheumatoid arthritis, Dina struggles physically to create each new painting, but the bigger problem is the missing passion in her life that inspired her best work. Having no use for words, she makes her dislike for Jack’s over-the-top extroversion apparent immediately. More than happy to lob words at her until the wall of isolation starts to crack, Jack premises his courtship of Dina on a contest to determine whose chosen form of expression is superior. Will love bloom on the cultural battlefield? Of course.
Admittedly, that’s layering the setup with a few too many coats of snark, as there’s nothing inherently wrong with an odd couple romance this familiar. In fact, had Words and Pictures chosen to keep things focused on the usual tropes and expectations, it would have been safely unremarkable. Instead, it charges headfirst into a tar pit of obnoxious pomposity that swallows the film’s words, pictures, frames, music and acting whole. Only in this regard does the film come close to providing the kind of universal connection through art that it so badly wants to create.
In an unexpected turn, 2014 has been chockablock with fantastic summer blockbusters, while among its more embarrassing whiffs have been two efforts to pay tribute to the highest of art. At least George Clooney’s The Monuments Men showed such genuine reverence for great art that it had the decency to shut up about it when at a loss for something worth saying; Words and Pictures prefers to approach the subject with the bluster of a garrulous aesthete, having Jack spend every non-slurred word evangelizing the power of the written word, all from atop not a soap box, but a stack of DVDs for Dead Poets Society.
Webster is probably owed a script credit, as roughly a third of Jack’s dialogue has him pedantically reciting definitions and etymology, another third being owed to all the poets and authors quoted by screenwriter Gerald Di Pego whenever he’s at a loss for words of his own. The remainder belongs to the film’s rote romance, and alien vision of the American education system. The poor young actors playing the film’s students are either forced to trot out mawkish inanities about what art means to them, or stare with enraptured awe as Mr. Marcus pillories the youth of today, with their damn tablets and Twitter.
The picture side of the equation fairs no better, as director Fred Schepisi shoots the film with all the dynamism of a tripod camera recording a Bar Mitzvah, the occasional slow zoom-in being the only real break from a barrage of static talking heads. Owen and Binoche seem at least partially aware of the actual movie being made here, and their scenes together provide Words and Pictures the rare occasion to peek its head out of its ass. Even one of Dali’s melting clocks would be right twice a day, so the occasional bit of insight does slip in as the two leads trade old chestnuts on the whys and drives of creativity. Who knew that having characters discuss art, rather than lecture about it from on high to a culturally-starved audience, would make for an engaging time?
When it’s not trying to light in you the kind of passion for the arts that the film itself purports to have, the story marches from one cliché beat to the next, always keeping one toe back in melodramatic reality to save the whole affair from turning into outright parody. Words and Pictures is too earnest to mock its characters, or their ego, so the world is not a worse place for having the film in it. But as one of the running gags sees the leads spend scene after scene listing off five-syllable words, only one example usually comes to mind when watching Words and Pictures: insufferable.
Words And Pictures Review
Disappointing
Without its likeable leads and occasional nuggets of insight, the pure obnoxiousness of Words and Pictures would leave you utterly speechless.
The pen may be mightier than the sword, but if a picture is worth a thousand words, who would win in a duel? That dialectical dilemma sets the stage for “Words and Pictures,” a highbrow romantic comedy that pits Clive Owen’s eccentric English teacher against Juliette Binoche’s disabled painter in a battle for the hearts and minds of their students — and, of course, each other. This kind of turf war between passion and reason, intellect and intimacy, is old hat for director Fred Schepisi, who plowed similar ground to sparkling effect in films like “Roxanne” and “Six Degrees of Separation” (even the Albert Einstein piffle “I.Q.”). But this time out, both the words and the pictures are surprisingly flaccid, largely due to Gerald DiPego’s literate but hopelessly contrived screenplay and direction that lacks Schepisi’s usual snap. Toronto pickup for Roadside Attractions should perform just OK with arthouse bluehairs.
Broadly speaking, Owen and Binoche’s characters here could be personifications of the double-sided Kandinsky canvas that occupied a central metaphorical perch in “Six Degrees”: on one side a formally rigorous geometric pattern, on the other a free-form abstraction. Looking like the latest member of the scruffy, disheveled fraternity of academics that also includes the Michael Douglas character from “Wonder Boys” and Michael Caine’s from “Educating Rita,” Owen plays Jack Marcus, a lauded poet who hasn’t written a word in years, now resigned to teaching the next generation at elite New England prep school Croyden. Then along comes Diana Delasanto (Binoche), an Italian-born figurative abstract painter felled by Rheumatoid Arthritis, the latest addition to the Croyden faculty.
She’s known colloquially as “The Icicle,” one of Owen’s colleagues (Bruce Davison) confides, a sentiment Diana confirms when she introduces herself to her class as “not the kind of teacher you’re going to come back to visit when you’re all grown up, with a box of chocolates and a Hallmark card.” Well, maybe not, but Hallmark sentiments — of both the greeting-card and the “Hall of Fame” TV-movie variety — are precisely what “Words and Pictures” rarely rises above.
DiPego, a veteran big-studio scribe (whose credits include the John Travolta hit “Phenomenon”) aiming to do something weightier here, hasn’t written characters so much as stand-ins for a series of half-baked pseudo-intellectual ideas. So Owen lectures his class about the ability of words to form original images (quoting from Updike, McEwan, et al.) while Binoche tells hers that painting can express feelings that lie beyond words. In contrast to most pics of this type, the students themselves remain a somewhat dazed, inarticulate mass. Owen even refers to them as “droids.” Add to this both characters’ pesky afflictions — her RA, his writer’s block and penchant for the bottle — and you have a movie that racks up some pretty egregious fees in excess symbolic baggage. (Owen even gets an estranged college-age son to boot.)
Schepisi and his highly capable cast do what they can with the material, and there’s some fleeting charm in Binoche and Owen’s barbed courtship, which strives for Tracy-Hepburn but ends up somewhere closer to Hanks-Ryan. There’s only so much that can be done, though, with a movie that forces Owen to sit before a blank computer screen waiting for the poetic muses to call, while Binoche hobbles around on a walking stick, fighting her own body as she slathers paint across canvas. (The paintings, which were actually created by the actress herself, are not at all unimpressive.)
In cinematic terms, the movie is almost all talk and few memorable images. Despite the presence of longtime Schepisi d.p. Ian Baker, the widescreen HD lensing has a flat, washed-out look, though vet production designer Patrizia Von Brandenstein had done a fine job appointing the pic’s prep-school milieu (shot in Vancouver doubling for Maine).