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.
