‘The Words’ is spellbinding look at expectations

“The Words” is an admirable story filled with well-written char­ac­ters and a plethora of emo­tional con­tin­gen­cies. The movie begins with Clay Ham­mond (Quaid) as an author approach­ing the podium to read excerpts from his lat­est novel. As he delves deeper into the pages of his work, his voice becomes the spo­ken nar­ra­tive for the movie itself.

Rory (Cooper) and Dora (Sal­dana) escape the rain into a lim­ou­sine as an old man watches them from the thresh­old of an hotel. The cou­ple dis­cusses the overnight suc­cess of his novel while they are on their way to a lit­er­ary award cer­e­mony. Rory is to be given a pres­ti­gious award for the highly acclaimed book, which he has just writ­ten. He steps up to the podium and accepts the award with a plagued look of guilt in his eyes.

The story then takes you back five years prior to the award cer­e­mony when Rory and Dora were a cou­ple in the infancy of their rela­tion­ship. You see them grow closer and fall deeper and deeper in love as you see them in a mon­tage of their begin­nings with one another. Rory decides to put his nor­mal job on hold and pur­sue a career in writ­ing. He spends the bulk of three years cre­at­ing a man­u­script that he believes is his crown­ing achieve­ment. The pub­lish­ing com­pa­nies believe in him, but just feel like this is not a book that would be well received by the pub­lic in today’s mar­ket. He is ready to give up and even asks his father for mon­e­tary sup­port until he can get back on his feet. Dora is very sup­port­ive of Rory and is will­ing to make every sac­ri­fice that enables him to fol­low his dream of becom­ing a writer. They are soon mar­ried and decide to hon­ey­moon in Paris. While in Paris, they hap­pen into an antique store. A tat­tered leather satchel catches Rory’s eye. Dora can see how much he adores it and decides to pur­chase it for him to keep his writ­ing sup­plies in.

One night as Rory was unable to sleep, he moves some of his papers into the satchel and dis­cov­ers a story that has been typed on very old parch­ment. It was the great­est thing that he has ever writ­ten. Want­ing to feel what it would be like to write such a great piece of lit­er­a­ture, he types the entire story into his com­puter ver­ba­tim. Rory has no inten­tion of tak­ing it any fur­ther; he just does this in order to feel inspired.

As the story tran­spires, you real­ize that this is the book that leads to the award cer­e­mony. Rory is given all of the credit and he is even able to get his orig­i­nal man­u­script pub­lished as well. The old man from the begin­ning of the film waits for the per­fect oppor­tu­nity to con­front him about the crux of the story in which he pla­gia­rized. The old man gains, Rory’s utmost atten­tion as he tells him the events behind the story that are in his novel

Inter­ested yet? This is just the first few min­utes of the story and there are so many more lay­ers that unfold. I watched this movie with an immerse mind. When I was given “The Words” to review, I had not even heard of it and had very lit­tle expec­ta­tions for a movie that I had never seen a pre­view for (which is pretty rare since I try to attend sev­eral movies a week). The char­ac­ter­i­za­tion por­trayed by this set of actors was very pro­nounced. I have seen many Bradley Cooper films and he is a down­right good actor. He pulls off dra­matic just as well as he does comedic. Jeremy Irons has always taken inter­est­ing roles. His guise in “The Words” ranks up there with his role in Die Hard 3 and The Lion King for me. The spe­cial effects makeup on him was aston­ish­ing too. Don’t be sur­prised when this movie pulls a few Acad­emy Awards this year.

You will expe­ri­ence a wave of emo­tions dur­ing this movie, and I am not just talk­ing about the “but­ter­flies” that Bradley Cooper gives your wife. (Don’t worry fel­low guys; Olivia Wilde is in it too). “The Words” is a very inter­est­ing story about liv­ing up to your own expec­ta­tions, what it takes to get there and how you would deal with the out­come. There are parts that will make you feel like you just got punched in the gut and there are parts where you feel gen­uinely excited for the char­ac­ters when things go their way. Over­all, if this sounds like some­thing you might want to see, it is worth check­ing out.

Posted by Scott Hall on Sep 7 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.