In The Words, bestselling author Clay Hammond (Dennis Quaid) reads passages from his novel, The Words, about Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper), a struggling writer whose fiancée, Dora (Zoë Saldana), sticks by him during the years he spends toiling away in borderline poverty on his first book. Though he isn’t without ability, he can’t find a taker, so he gets a mailroom job with a publishing house.
While honeymooning in Paris, Dora buys him a vintage satchel in which he finds an unsigned manuscript. After she breaks into tears at the beauty of the prose, thinking she’s finally gotten a true glimpse of his talent, he publishes the manuscript as The Window Tears under his own name, and it becomes a literary phenomenon, but then a shadowy figure starts following him around.
The real writer, in turns out, is an older man (Jeremy Irons), who turns out to have real life ties to the text, which centers on a young American (Ben Barnes) stationed in France during World War II, who loses his heart to literature and love (Nora Arnezeder) in ways both wonderful and terrible.
The three story strands, which involve Olivia Wilde as an overly intense fan, mean to comment on each other in ways that don’t always pan out, but debut directors Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal have crafted a smoothly suspenseful tale that couldn’t be timelier in light of the plagiarism scandals that have been rocking the publishing world.
The meat of this movie is as much about the struggles living up to expectations as it is about plagiarism. The pressures to have a “real job” and the approval you seek from those around you and what price you are willing to pay to hang on to that approval. When you feel it is your calling to be a writer, you constantly are filled with self doubt. Will I ever be good enough? Will my writing ever be good enough?
Because these are the driving forces of the film, of course it isn’t some after-school special aimed at bringing an end to plagiarism. It is structured around the choices we make in building our lives. What are we willing to sacrifice for success? While the nested stories could have gone very wrong, the film is well-executed and not hard to follow.
Director: Brian Klugman, Lee Sternthal
Year of Release: 2012
Character to watch: Bradley Cooper as Rory Jansen.
Journal your answers to the following questions after you watch the movie.
- How does this particular character’s journey compare with yours?
- Did the character develop certain characteristics during the movie that you have or that you would like to have? If so, what are those characteristics?
- What obstacles did this character face? What was his or her biggest challenge?
- What would you have done differently if you had been in the same position as the character?
- Is this character the type of person you would be friends with? Why or why not?