The Words

SPOILER ALERT! The plot will be discussed.

The Words (2012) is a story within a story within another story. It focuses on what is real and what is imaginative, and how this line can blur when an author creates characters that are so real they become more important than actual people in the writer’s life. It also deals with the talent to create a truly inspired work of art, and someone who would appropriate the work of another to make up for a lack of that unique ability. 

Writer Clay Hammond (Dennis Quaid) is doing a reading of his recently released novel, The Words. The question as the story unfolds is whose words are they? Hammond is telling us about a tale within the movie in which Hammond is a character. The film dramatizes the narration as Hammond says that there is an Old Man (Jeremy Irons, terrific in this role) watching in the rain as Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper, in a fine but not well known performance) and his wife, Dora (Zoe Saldana) exit a building in New York City. It appears to the Old Man that the couple was able to avoid the water drops, implying they were blessed by fate. At his dreary apartment, the Old Man looks decrepit, using a cane, and his medicine cabinet is filled with medications. In contrast the Jansens look picture perfect in their fine clothes as they ride in a limousine to a ceremony awarding Rory a prestigious writing award. 

Rory starts his acceptance speech by making an interesting statement, saying, “I simply tried to set down the truth as I imagined it.” Fiction’s connection to facts can be remote, as in fantasy stories. It is more aligned to them when dealing with tales that approach reality. But, even there, it is “imagined.” By insightfully portraying what people experience and feel, and how they behave, the author can demonstrate the “truth” about human existence. Rory says he hopes he can come up with something for his next book, an ironic statement, we later discover. There are cuts to the Old Man as he scans Rory’s novel, which implies that there is a connection between him and Rory’s story.

There is a cut back to Hammond who shifts the narrative to five years earlier so as to provide a backstory. The early part of Rory’s life as a writer is like those of others trying to be successful. Rory and Dora moved to Brooklyn after college. He starts out like most novelists, creating a story, doing the revising, and submitting his manuscript. But, in the meantime, he and Dora have little money. Rory approaches his father (J. K. Simmons) for some funds, and we discover it isn’t the first time he has gone to his dad for help. Rory doesn’t want to ask for cash since, like most people, he wants to make it on his own. He reminds his father that two years ago there was a decision to give the writing career a chance. His dad, like other parents in a similar situation, tells him the writing should now be a “hobby,” and he should work at something that brings in a steady income. His father gives in and writes him a check, but tells him it’s the last one. He tells Rory that part of being a man is to accept one’s “limitations.” That is a tough reality to accept because most young people have dreams that they want to live up to. But when is it okay to accept that not all hopes become real, with the possibility that prematurely failing to apply oneself means giving up too early? 

Hammond relates how Rory received nothing but negative responses to the submissions of his novel, or worst of all, “silence.” This last form is the worst kind of rejection because it implies that a writer’s work didn’t even warrant a comment. Rory gets a low-level job delivering mail and packages at a large publishing company in order to foster literary connections. He sort of half-jokingly tells a fellow worker, also an aspiring writer, that he writes “angry young men” fiction, which most likely mirrors his frustration at not getting published. 

Dora wonders one evening if Rory is going to write that night. He isn’t feeling like it, and so he may be accepting those “limitations.” Hammond says, “without even knowing it they had settled into their lives.” The operative word here is “settled,” which means no longer trying to strive for something more fulfilling. The couple marries and honeymoons in Paris. They stop to take a picture of a plaque which notes that Ernest Hemingway stayed at that spot. Being where one of the world's most famous writers lived brings with it awe and also envy on the part of another author. They stop at an antique store where Rory discovers an old soft leather briefcase. Dora loves it and buys it for him, and it eventually changes his life.

Rory continues to write, but there is disappointment on his face as he sits in front of his laptop. He has been at the publishing house job long enough that he is instructing trainees. He is overjoyed, as any hopeful author would be, when a literary agent, Timothy Epstein (Ron Rifkin), sets up a meeting with him and tells Rory that his book is very accomplished, and that he sees “so much truth” in his writing. But Epstein says the work is “interior,” subtle, and is a work of art, which, ironically, makes it too literary to be marketable coming from an unknown writer. It is the book business Catch-22 (which of course is the title of a famous book), that one can’t get published if the author isn’t already published. 

The movie itself comments on the writing process by showing us the difference between a successful story and one that isn’t. Up to this point, except for the mysterious Old Man, which keeps us invested, Rory’s story is not noteworthy, certainly not one that we would recommend reading. But that changes with what happens next. Rory finds a manuscript in the old briefcase that Dora bought him, which he reads. (IMDb notes that the first page is from Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Hemingway’s ghost haunts this film). Hammond narrates that Rory could not stop thinking about what he found, and that “he had been confronted by everything he had ever aspired to be, and the reality of what he would never become.” Despite the fact that Epstein praised his work, Rory is humbled by encountering a level of achievement that he knows he can’t reach. And he is infuriated by finding out, as he says to Dora, “I’m not who I thought I was.” He has the love and devotion for writing, but not the talent (which is a similar theme in the play and movie, Amadeus). It is crushing to believe that he is not the great writer he thought he was, and he has no other aspiration, so he feels lost. Dora, understandably, is hurt by his words since she thought their love in the nonfiction world was the cornerstone of their lives (which, of course is also not real, because Hammond made it up, who was also created by the co-screenwriters and co-directors, Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal. Many layers here). 

Rory escapes his limitations by copying the found novel in an attempt to channel the revered anonymous writer through his typing. Hammond says Rory just wanted “the words to pass through his fingers, through his mind.” He even keeps the spelling mistakes. He places his thumbprint over the one on the original manuscript’s page, as if trying to be part of the tale’s uniqueness. Dora comes across his retyping on the laptop and believes her husband wrote the story. She is overwhelmed and tells him he is everything that he wanted to be. She says the new words show that he “stopped hiding. They're fuller, they’re truer, they’re more honest.” Rory’s own work was artistic, but an empty vessel, devoid of the emotional depth that, according to Dora, he shows in life. But Rory is not happy choosing a happy, though circumscribed life, over what a piece of accomplished fiction can bring him. Rory starts out by trying to clear up the misunderstanding, but after seeing how moved and adoring Dora is, he finds that he can’t disappoint her. Rory knows he can’t receive recognition for his own writing, so he decides to go for half of the dream by being the recipient of the praise of another’s work. His copying of the novel turns into replicating just the fame of a successful author. He submits the novel, called The Window Tears, about “A young man’s journey through love and loss in 1940’s Paris.” The book becomes a number one best-selling novel and garners critical acclaim. (It is interesting that the number two book on the best-seller list is entitled Buried Lies, an obvious echo of what is happening in the movie). He could have been honest and accepted his “limitations” honorably, but as Hammond says, “Rory Jansen had made his choice,” to become a fraud. The backstory concludes and Hammond says, “And then he met the Old Man.” Quite a teaser, as the author announces the end of part one. 

There is a break in the reading and we are now in the primary part of the story which deals with Hammond. While signing books, a beautiful young woman, Daniella (Olivia Wilde), approaches the author and obviously knows things about him, such as his favorite wine. He invites her to spend some private time with him during the intermission. She shows that she knows a great deal more about Hammond, including food preferences, and music and TV show favorites. She also knows that he is separated from his wife, but he still wears his wedding ring, probably because he has been married for quite a while, and clings to that past reality. Daniella sounds like a groupie, but she reveals that she obtained her backstage pass from her college professor, and she herself is an aspiring writer, having won the same literary award as did Hammond when he was younger. Is she similar to Rory in Hammond’s novel, a writer who hopes to be great at some point, admiring the work of another storyteller?

When the break is over and Hammond returns to the stage, the center of attention, which is where Rory hoped to be and found his way there under false pretenses. The Old Man rides the bus that Rory takes to New York City’s Central Park, and sits near him on a park bench. Rory is reading a book and the Old Man says he met the author, who they both agree should have been better appreciated, which is probably what Rory feels about his own writing. When Rory wonders out loud, “What happened?” to the author, the Old Man says, “life,” which also fits what happened to this stranger. He knows who Rory is as he pulls out a newspaper article that is about winning the writing award. The Old Man asks him how it feels to be so well known. Rory says it’s good to have one’s work recognized, but the irony is that it isn’t his. The Old Man says with a hint of sarcasm that God looked down on Rory and said there is a writer. Rory says that he wrote two other books that wouldn’t have been published if it hadn’t been for The Window Tears, which helped him get over that Catch-22 glitch that guarantees that nothing breeds success like success. The Old Man says that he read Rory’s book and felt like he was right there, tasting the wine, sitting in the cafe, making love to the girl, hearing the child crying, and longing for his distant home. After the man praises his writing, Rory feels a bit uneasy with this enthusiastic man, possibly out of guilt. He says he has to leave, and the Old Man asks Rory to sign his copy of the book. Rory doesn’t have a pen and the Old Man comments, “a writer without a pen,” which has the subtext that he is an author without the words.

The Old Man says he has “a story.” He says that if he told it to Rory and he wrote it he might be able to give the Old Man some credit. Rory’s response is, “Well that wouldn’t be fair, would it?” But that is exactly what Rory has done, and he starts to leave since The Old Man is cutting close to the bone now. The Old Man then drops the bomb which shows he is the writer of Rory’s novel when he says his story is “about a man who wrote a book then lost it, and the pissant kid who found it.” Rory sits down next to him.

The Old Man now is the narrator as we get to the third story of the film (so Hammond is narrating what another narrator is saying). He says there was a Young Man, a soldier (Ben Barnes), in Paris in 1944 who hadn’t seen action in WWII. The young man worked to rebuild sewer pipes after the German occupation, stressing how lowly his life was literally and figuratively. But he was happy doing these details with fellow soldiers. He became best friends with a scholarly fellow who lent him books that opened his mind up and planted the desire to be a writer. He then meets Celia (Nora Arnezeder). They only knew each other's word for “Yes,” which the Old Man says made it “the perfect relationship.” Here the Old Man suggests that when it comes to love, words, essential for a story, can become a problem when one chooses them over real people, as we shall see. The verbal communication between the two comes later as they rejoice in their time together. The Young Man was then discharged from the army and went back to his American home, working at a market. Back there, “nothing had changed,” but he had. His old life felt “small” after seeing other parts of the world, meeting Celia, and acquiring the desire to write. 

So, he started to write but he was not successful (like Rory?). He left America and went back to Paris and Celia. He started to be a journalist for one of the many publications hiring ex-patriots and the Old Man says it was “a good place to learn.” Perhaps writing about real people gave the Young Man the training to connect to others on a genuine level, which Rory’s writing does not achieve. (Here we have another reference to Hemingway and how he was a journalist in France, and also the time Rory saw Hemingway’s house in Paris). Even some of the shots of how the Young Man kisses Celia mirror Rory’s actions with Dora and both couples married after moving in together. Unlike Rory, the Young Man and his wife had a child, which adds more experience to his story as their two paths diverge.

When the Old Man hesitates, Rory wants him to continue, drawn into the story as he was by the Old Man’s novel, as we are drawn into Hammond’s book, and the story of the film as a whole. He says that the baby cried all the time, and they found out “my daughter” was hopelessly ill. So we now know what we suspected, that this story is what really happened to the Old Man. The grief from the death of the baby damages their marriage as Celia becomes numb and distant. She leaves to stay at her mother’s home. With another allusion to Hemingway, the Young Man reaches for his copy of The Sun Also Rises. It is Hemingway’s first novel which he wrote after quitting his journalism job, taking time alone, away from his family, in order to put all his effort into his fiction. 

The Young Man at first starts to toss stuff in his apartment in anger and despair. But on the back of Celia’s farewell note he starts to type his own work of fiction. His use of the other side of the piece of paper symbolically shows how he turns a negative into a positive, using his writing as a way to purge his pain and turn death into a creative birth. We even see the ink thumbprint that Rory noticed on the found manuscript page. The Old Man says words flowed out of the Young Man (himself) and, “The words became form, the form became whole,” and he completed the novel in only two weeks. After performing this healing process of the imagination, the Young Man slept and then went to be with his wife and gave her his book. But, she wasn’t ready to reunite and sent him back to Paris. She put the pages in the briefcase (the one Dora bought) and a little later decided to return to Paris and “start life over.” But she left the book on the train, which removes the possibility of beginning again for the Young Man, who felt the book “saved him.” The implication here is that he has lost a second child that he helped to bring into the world. 

He becomes angry with Celia and searches for the lost work (which is another connection to Hemingway, since his wife lost a collection of the author’s stories). The young man eventually left to go home, as Celia did when they lost their child. But, the Old Man says, he couldn’t write anymore because, “he was never able to set down one word that looked right to him.” The suggestion here is that he had written his book when there was a flood of emotion that channeled all of his feelings into the words on his typewriter, and after that, the inspiration receded. As the Old Man says, maybe he didn’t want to go “that deep again,” into the depths of that tormented ocean. He eventually found a sort of “peace.” But, just like a storyteller, he adds that’s when his tale became even more interesting. He says the Young Man was now the Old Man, himself, and he read Rory’s novel and knew that it was his words in the book. He says that he wanted Rory to know the story behind the story and maybe he now has the makings of another book (which is the one Hammond is telling), but the Old Man’s statement is sarcastic, implying Rory may steal from him again to write about the first theft of “the words.” 

The Old Man walks away and Hammond ends his reading at this point to draw the audience into buying his book (and the filmmakers hook us as we want to know what comes next). It also allows the movie to further develop Hammond’s character. Hammond sees Daniella waiting by herself, smiling, and the writer, who seduces others with his work, is also being seduced. He takes her to his elegant apartment, but he hasn’t unpacked since becoming separated from his wife. He is adrift, like the characters in his book. (Daniella picks up a baseball off of Hammond’s desk that Babe Ruth supposedly hit for a home run. IMDb notes that a similar ball is pictured on Rory’s desk. Has Hammond just used an object he owns as a prop in his story or does this coincidence suggest that maybe Hammond also stole another’s work earlier in his career and his current novel is a sort of confession?). He wonders why Daniella wants to be something “silly” like a writer, and says words “ruin everything,” which suggest how harmful they can be when they become more important than real life. He echoes what he says in his book about the perfect relationship being devoid of them. Yet his living uses words, so he is a living contradiction, revealing an almost self-loathing. She doesn’t have the patience to read the book and wants Hammond to tell her how the book ends.

He continues the narration to his one-person audience. Rory gets drunk so he can tell Dora that he didn’t write the book. He wants to know why she loves him because he is afraid that she really committed to him when she thought it was his story. He wants her to admit that she knew all along he couldn’t be that good a writer in order to assure himself that the book isn’t why she is still there with him. But she loved him before the novel and her pain and anger derives from his dishonesty. 

He even confesses his plagiarism to his publisher, Joseph Cutler (Zeljko Ivanek), and says he wants to take his name off of the book. The furious Cutler says a public admission will destroy Rory and him. He proposes a cover-up by saying Rory can pay the Old Man whatever he wants to ease his conscience, and assures him that writers have committed this crime before. Rory initially dismisses that notion, implying that just because someone does something wrong it doesn’t justify another to do the same. When he asks if the subsequent book that Cutler published, that was his own, is as good as the Old Man’s, Cutler’s silence tells Rory what he already knows about his limited talent. 

Rory discovers the Old Man working at a plant nursery, where things still live, as opposed to what happened to his child and his writing. Rory says he wants to make things right by removing his name from the book and give the Old Man the royalties. But the Old Man is angry about what Rory did in the first place, taking a part of his life, the “joy and the pain that gave birth to those words,” for Rory’s own benefit. The Old Man will not allow Rory a way to dispel his guilt. But, he is still a writer at heart, and feels compelled to tell Rory, an eager listener, like us all, that part of the story that is not in the book. He says he saw his wife one more time, and there is a scene which shows him as the Young Man on a train that stops at a station. A man, holding a child, approaches and kisses Celia, and the Young Man realizes that she has been able to move on, unlike him, and start a new family, a new life. Their eyes meet and they tentatively wave to each other as he pulls away from her forever. The Old Man says she looked happy which gave him pain, but also some relief since he discovered that he hadn’t permanently hurt Celia. He says that allowed him to not keep looking back. Rory feels the Old Man would have had a better life if he continued to write. But the Old Man responds with something that is significant to the theme of the movie. He says, “my tragedy was that I loved words more than I loved the woman who inspired me to write them.” Rory has made a similar choice, as have many artists who chose their creations over those important people that were in their lives. Maybe the art connects with others, maybe even changes them. But, the sacrifices can be awful. The Old Man tells Rory that everyone makes choices, but they, like Rory, have to live with the consequences. Before he goes, Rory tells the man, “I do love your book,” which personally acknowledges the Old Man’s ownership and talent with no selfish attempts to lessen Rory’s guilt. Hammond concludes by telling Daniella that Rory continued living his lie, and the Old Man died a couple of weeks after Rory visited him. There is a shot of Rory dropping the original manuscript into the Old Man’s open grave. Hammond says, “It was as if by locking off the secret of one man’s life forever, he had unveiled another much deeper and darker secret within himself.” The implication is that Rory enjoyed his success that was not earned, and lived with the more awful truth that he was the kind of person who allowed himself to benefit from such a deception.

Hammond says there is no moral attached to his story, and that someone can make a terrible mistake in life, and even live well afterwards. Daniella says that is “bullshit,” because everyone must deal with guilt. We then get images of Rory and Dora, but they are not from anything written, and seem to spring from Hammond’s mind. Daniella wants to know what Hammond really believes would happen if the circumstances in the story actually occurred in real life. Here is where reality and imagination begin to blur. Hammond angrily says she has manipulated herself into being with him and getting him to talk. After all, she, too, has a selfish agenda as she wants to further her career. He turns the question back onto Daniella, and wants to know how she thinks it would play out if the story was genuine. 

She gets her jacket to leave and says about Rory, “He’s fucked,” because even though he may continue to write, “he’ll never, ever believe it. He’s robbed himself of the chance to find out” if he will ever really be accepted on his own merits since he already achieved fame under false circumstances. She also suggests that “maybe his marriage falls apart because for him and his wife to look at one another is for them to look at the truth” about the lie they are living. Rory might, in public, be able to “wear that mask of confidence and sophistication, but back when he’s alone late at night, he can’t sleep, because when he closes his eyes he still sees the face of that old man.” Hammond encourages her as she speaks, as if mentoring her writing, and then contributes the possibility that, “maybe he sees his own face, and the old man is just a story he made up.” Hammond is now talking about himself. He has written his book because he has the same struggle as the Young Man and Rory. He continues by saying, “At some point, you have to choose between life and fiction. The two are very close, but they never actually touch.” 

 Hammond tries to have that real “touch” by kissing Daniella passionately, but, despite what he just said, Hammond pulls back as an image of Dora holding Rory’s face in her hands appears. Hammond moves away and says Daniella should leave. She understands and says that Hammond “never let her go.” He conjured up Dora, and he can’t give up that fantasy of her, since he created in fiction what he can’t have in life. He couldn’t write an unhappy ending for Dora and Rory because he is living through his fiction and thus he would also experience a sad finish. She throws his words back at him, asking what does he want, “life or fiction?” We then get flashbacks of romantic moments between Rory and Dora, and we know that the writer chooses the words. 

The next film is Laura.