Late last month, I went with my mom to see the movie Words and Pictures, which opened in New
York in May but hadn’t come to the
Washington area until early in June. I don’t
normally write about film on ROT—the
closest I’ve come, not counting some film pieces I republished but didn’t
write, were “Everybody Comes To Rick’s” (17 May 2009), an article about
the play on which the movie Casablanca
was based; “Der Illegale” (5
July 2009), a post about an old German TV miniseries that had been based on an
actual espionage case; and “Cinderella:
Impossible Things Are Happening (CBS-TV, 31 March 1957)” (25 April 2013), a reminiscence on the
original telecast of the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical—and I’m not
going to critique this one or analyze it as a piece of movie art. I’ll say that it’s a perfectly all-right
romance (some reviewers said “rom-com,” others, “rom-dram”) which many film
journalists likened to Dead Poets Society
because of some superficial similarities.
But I caught what I see as an ironic twist which doesn’t appear in that other
(or any) prep school-sited film and I’m not sure it’s intentional.
Directed by Fred Schepisi (Roxanne, Six
Degrees of Separation, I.Q.) from a screenplay by Gerald Di Pego (Born
Innocent, TV; Message in a Bottle), Words and Pictures recounts the story of Maine prep-school English
teacher Jack Marcus (Clive Owen—Gosford
Park, Closer, Sin City, Hemingway & Gellhorn) who laments his students’ lack of interest in the
power of the written word. (I’m with him
here: I’m a recovering writing teacher myself.) Once a celebrated poet, Marcus hasn’t
published in years and has taken heavily to drink, putting his job in jeopardy. The editor of the Croyden Prep literary
magazine, which had been a prize-winning journal in part because of his own
contributions as well as the work of the students he published, he learns that
the magazine may be dropped as an unproductive expense in this digital, on-line
world.
When Marcus meets
Dina Delsanto (Juliette Binoche—The
Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Lovers on the Bridge,
The English Patient, Chocolat), a painter and new teacher who was once
celebrated for her canvases, he immediately finds her a challenge. Delsanto, who suffers from rheumatoid
arthritis which is slowly but inexorably robbing her of her mobility and
independence, hasn’t exhibited—or painted, for that matter—for a long
time. The art teacher disparages words
as a conveyor of meaning and import—almost as if she knows that this will set
Marcus off. “A picture is worth a
thousand words” becomes her mantra, and he responds with, “There is no
frigate like a book” (Emily Dickenson, 1873/1894).
The two flirt and
provoke each other with equal relish—à la Beatrice and Benedick of Much Ado About Nothing. (Most reviewers saw an attempt to reflect Hepburn-Tracy
and a couple compared the pairing to Ryan-Hanks. But I instantly recognized Shakespeare’s
witty middle-agers.) When Delsanto is
introduced in the faculty lounge, the two teachers immediately start
needling. Delsanto, a muffler
artistically wrapped around her neck, tells Marcus she teaches honors art and
Jack quips, “Hence the scarf,” and says he teaches honors English. Delsanto replies without missing a beat,
“Hence the hence.” (That’s meeting cute
at an elite prep school!) The clash
isn’t just between Marcus’s words and Delsanto’s pictures, of course, or
between the eccentric and contrarian English instructor and the stand-offish
and demanding painter. It’s also between
one teacher who treats the students as if they were his promising but slacker
little brothers and sisters (or, perhaps, nephews and nieces), and whose
students all call him “Mr. Mark” (except the class clown who calls him “Captain Jack” after Walt Whitman’s 1865 “O Captain! My Captain!”), and another
who takes a sterner and colder tack, becoming known as “The Icicle,” “The Ice
Queen,” or “Frigid Fresco. “ (Of course,
this is a scriptual conceit: Owen’s Marcus is never really that cool—he wants
to be liked, even loved, but his behavior and unrelenting iconoclasm make that
difficult for colleagues, students, and family—and Binoche’s Delsanto—she wants
to appear challenging and unaccommodating, “not the kind of teacher you’re
going to come back and visit”—is more passionate, about her art, about her
students, and about Marcus than she’s made out to be.)
Marcus conceives
a plan to focus his students’ attention on their writing: he declares a contest
between words and pictures and challenges Delsanto and her honors art class to
prove which has “more worth.” Marcus
teaches his English students that writers evoke original images that pictures
can’t capture because they exist only in the mind; Delsanto counters by
insisting that a painting can convey feelings words can’t express. Words are “lies” and “traps,” Delsanto warns
her art students (some of whom are also in Marcus’s English class). “Words are your gods,” the English teacher
counters when one student of both teachers reports Delsanto’s pronouncement. “And
somebody has insulted your religion.” The best work of her art students
and his writing students will be published in the next issue of the literary
journal—which Marcus had insisted normally doesn’t run pictures—it’s all words. (Ultimately Marcus proposes that Delsanto
paint a picture about a poem he’ll write and both works will be published.) Delsanto and her art students accept Marcus’s
challenge, and the battle commences.
Of course, it’s a silly debate, like the one over whether
actors are creative or interpretive artists or whether Shakespeare wrote his
plays, but buy the premise . . . buy the bit.
It’s a false dichotomy—who says we have to choose one medium over the
other? (Just before the final presentation
of the Words and the Pictures to the assembled school, I had a brief thought about
artists who use both words and pictures—like William Blake, for instance, a
writer and a painter who integrated text into his images, or Jenny Holzer, who
uses words as pictures—or at least
visual imagery. They didn’t choose. The Dada poets, conversely, used words not so
much for their meanings as for the pictures they could make on the printed page. This idea never came up in the movie.) It doesn’t help the argument that, first,
Delsanto is as articulate and verbal as Marcus, though we don’t know if she
writes as well as she speaks, and second, that Marcus, despite Di Pego’s
characterization that he’s “an English teacher who loves language, worships
language,” is as much focused on vocabulary
as text. He plays a game involving polysyllabic words
that’s unrelated to their meaning or use (and at which Delsanto is the only
faculty member who can keep up with him and even beat him) and he constantly specifies,
no matter the circumstances, the etymology of words he or someone else uses. In that last scene, in which the two sides
rehash their arguments from earlier in the movie but in muted, less strident
terms, Marcus ultimately declares that writers are also artists, so there’s not
really a conflict since both—all—kinds of artists “take us to another place.” (I can’t explain why it took anyone in the
film this long to see that—except, of course, that there wouldn’t be a movie if
the two artists had reconciled their pretended clash before the last scene. I guess I blame screenwriter Di Pego for this bit of contrivance. “I wanted to put them in a world that
challenged me,” he acknowledged of his characters. “I wanted to be challenged with language.”)
There’s also a secondary irony than the one on which I
picked up: when “words fail” Marcus, he communicates his feelings to Delsanto via
music, which is neither words nor pictures! This idea isn’t developed, just suggested. What’s central to the story, of course, is
that the man of words can’t write and the woman of pictures can’t paint. Delsanto fights back, devising mechanical
contraptions to help her overcome the RA, while Marcus gives in to the blockage
and takes refuge in the bottle, sinking so far into his debilitating morass that
he, first, steals a poem from his son to pass off as his latest work (he comes
clean before a public deception occurs) and, then, actually destroys Delsanto’s
newly produced and best canvas in a drunken frenzy. (Okay, the main characters lean toward
cliché—the drunken poet and the aloof, antisocial painter—but Owen’s and
Binoche’s vital, honest, and uncompromising performances humanize and redeem
them and the film in the final analysis.
Sorry, but I couldn’t resist a little reviewing, especially of the
acting.) But all that aside, the real
twist in Words and Pictures for me lies
in the question, In what medium is this story told? Cinema: a medium that depends on both words
and pictures, pretty much simultaneously and equally.
Okay, yes, there are many films that are more visual than
literary and others in which the language overshadows the images (not even
counting the silents, which, despite occasional title frames, had no choice but
to rely on pictures to communicate). But
by and large, a movie needs both the script (or at least the dialogue, whatever
its origin) and the cinematography to work.
(Since I’m bringing up the visual aspects of cinema, I should credit Schepisi’s director of photography,
Ian Baker, and his production
designer, Patrizia Von Brandenstein.
Their work was integral to the impact of Words and Pictures from the perspective I’m considering.) In the movie, Marcus’s scenes are
mostly verbal as we focus on the words he devises and the ones he quotes, but
Delsanto’s scenes are strongly visual because we watch her struggle to combat
the body that’s betraying her and her dynamic, highly physical method of
painting (augmented by her inventiveness in overcoming the impediments her RA
throws up before her creativity). If
Jackson Pollock was an action painter, Binoche’s Delsanto is a hyper-action
painter. While we need to listen to
Marcus, we have watch Delsanto to get all of what Binoche shows us. It’s telling, I think, that writer Di Pego, a former high school English
teacher himself, rejoices that among the writers he chose for Marcus to quote
were “some wonderful image-makers” and in the next breath recounts that
he was awed by seeing On the Waterfront at 13. “That movie just shook me,” Di Pego says, “and
made me want to be somebody that could tell stories.” (I guess it’s no surprise that this man
became not just a writer, but a screenwriter—a
man who composes in both words and pictures.)
(It’s a tangential sidelight to Words and Pictures that not only did Di Pego select the writers
Marcus cites in the movie—the screenwriter names novelists Ian McEwan, John Updike,
and Jeanette Winterson—but that he wrote the poem at the center of the story,
which Marcus passes off as his own latest work but had really been composed by
his son. Likewise, the paintings we see
Delsanto create in the film were actually painted by actor Binoche herself—some
before she made the movie and others expressly for the production. It’s not so much art imitating life or vice versa as life and art getting all
tangled up together. Words and pictures.)
So, here’s a story ostensibly about the tension between
words and pictures which is told in a medium that uses both, requires
both. As I said earlier, I don’t think
this was an intentional consideration of Schepisi’s movie since nothing’s made of it. I looked at a few reviews on line and no one mentions this and in the
interviews of Di Pego and Schepisi that I saw, they don’t speak of it, either. It’s possible that the writer, director, and others had the same
thought I have, but it doesn’t feel as if they meant the idea to be part of the
interpretation of the story or the production.
Nonetheless, it’s there. Well, at
least it is for me; no one I mentioned it to saw its significance. Maybe it’s a little too “meta” for most
moviegoers to contemplate.
I’m not even sure how it would fit into an interpretation of the movie,
which is probably too slight a vehicle to carry the weight of such a reflection. Why, in the end, set up a conflict, however
contrived and artificial, between words and pictures that’s played out in an
art form, cinema, that inherently contradicts the notion that either language
or imagery is primary in expressing ideas or feelings because it demonstrably
works on both levels at once. In
addition, as I observed, a movie specifically about the dichotomy, false though
it is, of the verbal and the visual must take conspicuous advantage of movie’s capacity
to tell stories in either words or pictures, as well as both words and pictures. So, by telling this story in a film, Di Pego
and Schepisi, a film writer and a filmmaker, have, in a sense, sabotaged their
own argumentative point.
[I said I wasn’t going to
assess the artistic worth of Words and Pictures, and I won’t (aside from my brief comment on the acting). I will say that I rather
enjoyed the movie, even if it's not a great film, but most reviews across the
country were cool to blah. (The New York Post dispatched it in three
short paragraphs!) Some praised the work
of Owen and Binoche even as they dismissed Di Pego’s script and Schepisi’s directing; others found the
actors’ work unimpressive in contrast to their past films. A few noted that for a summer movie,
particularly in light of the competing films being released right now, it’s a
passable diversion. I don’t even
disagree with much of the criticism offered, though I didn’t find the movie’s
faults as devastating as some reviewers clearly did, but on the whole, I found Words and Pictures pleasant, fun, and enjoyable.
The two central performances are strong and sincere, often nicely nuanced
(especially Binoche’s Delsanto) and the script is literate, if not
profound. It doesn’t hurt the film that
some of Binoche’s paintings are quite powerful.]
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