‘Words’ relishes in fun dialogue
Print Edition
IF it wasn’t for the charming top-liners who can make literary dialogue sound sexy in their sleep, the war in Fred Schepisi’s “Words and Pictures” would have to be called off after the opening skirmish. The battlefield is a country prep school where Clive Owen’s drunken English teacher and Juliette Binoche’s prickly art instructor square off, then pair off, in an amusing school-wide debate over whether literature or painting is best. The way the challenge between these two sharp minds will play out is the only thing that isn’t a foregone conclusion in the smooth-as-vodka screenplay, a middle-brow mashing together of “Dead Poets Society” and a romance-comedy for audiences allergic to vulgarity and sex scenes.
The film gives Binoche, who plays Italian painter Dina Delsanto, a chance to show off her own artwork, which is liberally displayed in the film and which looks considerably better and more painterly than simple props. Working with portraiture and large-scale abstraction, she plays a famous artist struck with rheumatoid arthritis and increasingly unable to move her arms and hands freely. Her solution is to use industrial-size paint dispensers hanging from overhead hooks which she can move artistically without fine brushwork. All these difficulties more or less justify her fierce anti-social attitude, which Binoche is able to carry off without becoming an unpleasant character.
Owen pulls out a surprisingly literate side of himself in the role of Jack Marcus, an irrepressibly outspoken English teacher and wordsmith who, on the verge of being ousted from the school for alcoholic disorderliness, does something repulsively unethical to save his job. Owen is spectacular in maneuvering Jack’s way out of this mess, in which his grown-up son is involved. It’s a tribute to his inner appeal that he overcomes the cruelty of having to wear a grubby beard, heavy glasses and abominable corduroy jackets.
One can sympathize with Jack’s boredom with the faculty who won’t play word games with him, exception made for the wry old Walt (Bruce Davison). But with the spotlight focused on Jack and Dina, there seems to be little interest in developing peripheral characters, and students and teachers alike are hastily sketched, easily predictable figures.
On the plus side, Gerald Di Pego’s screenplay revolves around some truly witty, sassy dialogue.
Schepisi, whose last film was his adaptation “The Eye of the Storm,” is a general who marshals actors to bring emotional depth to almost any kind of screenplay.
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