Before Words and Pictures screened at the Dallas International Film Festival, the film’s director, Fred Schepisi, was invited on stage. While Words and Pictures stars Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche, locally it plays as a star vehicle for Dallas’ growing number cinema financiers. Words and Pictures was financed almost entirely from Dallas. “Dallas,”Schepisi suggested. “Is becoming the anti-Hollywood.”
But Words and Pictures doesn’t feel “anti” anything. It’s a saccharine, pandering romantic comedy about a cocky, alcoholic English teacher (Clive Owen) at a New England prep school who falls for the new art teacher (Juliette Binoche), a famous artist with rheumatoid arthritis. Their debilitations fit neatly into the character sketch: two middle-aged, unrealized artistic souls; running out of time; falling into despair and self-destruction. It’s obvious rom-com gravity will pull them together, but Words and Pictures pretends it will take some work, pitting Owen’s Jack against Binoche’s Dina in a contrived debate about the value of words (literature) verses pictures (visual art).
It’s difficult to think of another movie that mentions some version of its title as often as this one. Jack gets all Dead Poet’s Society on Dina, delivering spirited orations about the wonders of literature (words!), while Dina digs deep to inspire her students to create better art (pictures!). The two continue to bicker and verbally spar – sustaining a syllabic word game – before they suddenly flop into bed. But there’s tension: Jack’s drinking may cause him to lose his job, and Dina’s handicap is making it increasingly difficult to paint. Screenwriter Gerald Di Pego tosses in a few side plots – Jack’s estranged son, a bullied student – but neither feel like they add dimension to a world frame by Schepisi’ insistent shallow focus and ever-slowly panning camera.
Alcoholism can be a lazy way to lend a character demons, just as art and writing can be lazy ways to rope meaning into a story. These characters have little depth, and they are placed in a world that is insufficiently sketched, with plot points falling off the narrative like loose hub caps and a timeline that gets chewed and garbled towards the film’s end. There are some flashes of real warmth and an appealing off-kilter sense of humor, but neither sustain through the film. Most of the laughs, actually, are unintentional. It’s unclear whether or not Owen (English) and Binoche (French) are supposed to playing Americans, but both battle their accents. Tender scenes, like the film’s singularly effective romantic moment between in Dina’s studio, are ruined when, moments later, Owen’s Jack turns into a hyperbolic caricature of a drunk, guzzling vodka and stumbling into Dina’s wet painting.
The script is also rife with platitudes and clichés. And the rather ridiculous premise – this whole words vs. pictures debate – is not only innocuous, it seems there just to offer characters a soapbox for sophomoric ideas about life and art. It would all be insufferable if the film wasn’t so corny and overwrought that it ends up being unintentionally hilarious — like the weird soundtrack that feels pulled from a 70s sit com, and the finale, a school-wide debate about the merits of words and pictures, that feels like an idea for a Saved By the Bell episode.
