It’s hard to decide which part of this movie-going experience was more infuriating.
Currently it’s a toss-up between Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal’s “The Words” itself and the stupid mobile phone commercial that has been playing before the previews in every single movie for the past few months — the one where the spokesman ties up the guy running the projector and tries to speak directly to the audience, asking us to take our phones out, snap a photo of him and share the photo with our friends. I hated it the first time I saw it, and the second time, and the third time.
But during “The Words,” that commercial hit a new low. He was speaking to a theater filled with barely enough people to count on my own two hands and still have enough fingers free to carry a soda and a small tub of popcorn. It was such a pitiful scene, and it was still several previews until the beginning of the cinematic pile of excrement that was “The Words.”
Imagine, for a second, a simple story about a writer. Now make that story about that same writer talking about his book, which is about himself as a writer. Now make it about a writer who is reading his book about himself, the writer, to a crowd. And in the book, he steals a book from another guy who wrote an incredible book about his own life and then sought out the writer who stole his book so he could re-tell his story to him and then just lets the writer get away with plagiarism. Remember, all of this happens in the book the writer is reading.
That’s the plot of “The Words” in a nutshell. If that stopped making sense at any point, you have just begun to feel the pain this movie will bring you.
Most of your time will be spent wondering why you’re being retold something you’ve already been told by a different character.
Every “a-ha!” moment in the movie has already been hinted to, pointed at and painted with a bull’s-eye. When you’re not doing that, you’ll be wondering why half the movie is spent telling the backstory for The Old Man (Jeremy Irons), which has absolutely nothing to do with the main character, Clay Hammond, (Dennis Quaid) or the character in Quaid’s book, Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper), other than the fact that it happened to be The Old Man’s story that Rory stole. The gist of that story needed to be included, but it didn’t deserve a 45-minute long exposition from Jeremy Irons that seems to drag on for days and never truly advances the real plot of the story, although whether the plot was actually advanceable or not is debatable.
None of the characters give you any reason to care about what befalls them. Hell, the entire thing is set in a world of autobiographical fiction, aside from the parts where Quaid is standing at his podium and reading his book (which honestly would be the single most poorly written book in history). Quaid‘s actual character can only truly be assessed through the actions of Cooper’s character, which Quaid created to be mostly like himself. The entire thing is one, big, annoying plot loop, which only leads back to conclusions that could be made from the first few minutes.
Overall, “The Words” gets just one word out of five, and it’s a word I don’t think I’m allowed to put in print. If you’re looking to spend an hour and a half napping or figuring out how to kick yourself in the back of the head for actually choosing to see this movie, it’s totally the movie for you. For any of you non-masochists, this is definitely a movie to skip. Luckily, if you feel the sudden urge to wander into your local theater this weekend, “The Dark Knight Rises” is still playing in most locations. It’s also a good palate cleanser after seeing “The Words,” for anyone who drunkenly stumbles into the wrong screening.
