The Words (2012, rated PG, 102 minutes) is vigorous drama (but no guns, no car chase!) with some heart throbs and some lachrymose moments. There are two morals of this story, if you’re a would-be writer: don’t lose your earthshakingly good first novel in an old leather briefcase on a train, and don’t find an earthshakingly good novel on very old, smudged typewritten pages (written by an unknown someone else) in an old leather briefcase that your wife gave you. Either way, there’s a bad ending…
Imagine being tempted to pass off some other writer’s novel as your own.
There’s little reason, for most of the film, to imagine that the plot is the old play-within-a-play kind of thing. Near the end of the movie, Clay (Dennis Quaid) says to Daniella (Olivia Wilde): “You have to choose between life and fiction. The two are very close, but they never actually touch. They’re two very, very different things.”
Along with Daniella, the viewer is permitted to suspect that Clay’s book is secretly autobiographical.
Clay contradicts himself: he has made his life into a fiction, and they touch in grinding, heart- sore, never-ending ways.
Watch The Words now, by streaming through Kanopy
Watch The Words now, by streaming through Hoopla
