She Deviant || The Words: Review
Lety Gallegos graces us with another review. This time it’s of the directorial debut of Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal:
This movie begins with Clay Hammond, played by Dennis Quaid, reading an excerpt from his book The Words to an audience. We are then taken into the journey of the life of Rory, played by Bradley Cooper, who also happens to be a writer. This journey starts with an old man, seemingly in the background as he watches a couple get into a car. The couple is Rory and Dora, we then see that Rory is accepting a literary award for “just a little book” as he calls it. Then we are rushed into the start of Rory’s career five years earlier, straight out of college into a downtown loft in Brooklyn with his girlfriend Dora, played by Zoe Saldana. Rory is a struggling writer who can’t seem to find a publisher willing to publish his book. In order to make ends meet, he gets a day job at a big publishing company. Rory and Dora get married and while honeymooning in Paris, Rory comes across an old leather messenger bag in an antique shop which Dora promptly purchases for him. This bag happens to contain a very dated book draft which Rory finds weeks after. He then starts typing out the words from this book on his computer, he was so entranced by these words that he felt that he had to recreate them, word for word. Dora finds this story on his computer and begins to tell him how much that story is just like him and how much it is a part of him, not knowing that they were someone else’s words. He hands the novel over to an editor at his job that ends up falling in love with it and offers to be his agent. This book gets published under his name, which wins a fury of awards and recognition for these stolen words he called The Window Tears. Then Rory meets the old man. The old man starts to tell him a story, a love story intertwined with tragedy… except the words sounded all too familiar…
So what does a man do when he is then presented with such a dilemma? Does he ignore it? Try to fix it? Everyone is different and not everyone would react the same way. This film tackles the very touchy subject of plagiarism which is never an easy thing, stealing words that are not your words and presenting them as your own is dishonesty at its best. This film, at its core, is about decisions and how decisions lead to consequences and how one deals with those consequences. Everybody makes mistakes but not everyone can admit them. There is always a domino effect to decisions, and this film follows a man through the process of making a bad decision and then living with the consequences. Bradley Cooper does a good job at portraying the struggling writer and was a believable character. I heard this film wasn’t the biggest hit at the box office but I was not disappointed and thought the concept was original. You are presented a story within a story, within a story and it all seemed to fit and flow very well. Overall I give this film 4 out of 5 stars.
The Words is available NOW on Blu-ray and DVD from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
