Words and Pictures
Opens Friday at Fifth Avenue Cinemas
School is out. But in case your semesters weren’t packed with enough scholarly angst, spirited discourse and multisyllabic words, Words and Pictures has arrived to tax your brain.
I say tax the brain and not tug at the heart because the film is most definitely an academic love story. At the nexus of the story, as the title suggests, is an impossible argument about which is a more powerful art form: the written word or pictures on a canvas.
For the “words” team is Clive Owen as a jaded English Lit teacher deadened by his students’ lack of passion. Jack is a hit with his students but disliked by the administration and barely tolerated by staff, who are tired of his sesquipedalian word games.
Jack has taken to eating (and drinking) lunch in his car and has been banned by at least one restaurant for his boorish behaviour.
It’s not just Jack’s extra-curricular boozing that’s getting him in trouble with the board, which, unfortunately for Jack, includes an ex-lover (Amy Brenneman).
He was something of a literary star when he first started teaching, but he’s hit a dry spell. “I’m a published author: it doesn’t go away like the mumps.”
Jack argues against the publish-or-perish criteria, but he’s under pressure to produce something amazing before his next performance review.
On the side of “pictures” is new teacher Dina Delsanto (Juliette Binoche), a famous — and fearsome — artist who has taken a teaching job because of her declining health. She’s also feeling the heat: gallery owners are wondering why she isn’t painting anymore and her pride prevents her from telling them that she’s ill. (Binoche created many of the film’s original paintings.)
When one day a student remarks that a picture is much more powerful than words, Gina agrees. “The trouble is in the words… the words are lies, the words are traps,” she says.
It starts an academic feud with the already-disputatious Jack, who declares “this is war!” and involves his students in the dispute. It will all culminate in a school-wide debate that could make or break both of their careers.
One is damaged by drink, one by disease. Each is waging personal and professional wars, battling their own insecurities. But in the process of sparring with each other, Jack and Gina realize that they’re kind of into each other.
This is where Fred Schepisi’s (A Cry In The Dark) film falters. Though excellent separately, Binoche and Owen do not make a convincing couple. Maybe it’s both characters’ prickliness that makes actual lovemaking so unlikely: they never thaw long enough for things to get heated. And nothing feels as forced as their laughter and inevitable “aha” moment after the battle has been fought.
Where the plot is contrived, some witty wordplay comes in to save the day, though writer Gerald Di Pego (The Forgotten, Message in a Bottle) doesn’t know where to stop.
Filmed largely at St. George’s School here in Vancouver, the film is to be commended for raising the question “why art?” and actually taking some time trying to answer it. It’s on that level — and not as a romantic comedy — that Words and Pictures succeeds.
