Culture

Rating: B-

Like a lot of bad rom-coms, they really should have ditched the rom-com angle altogether and focused on the much more interesting subplots.

Handsome English teacher Jack Marcus (Clive Owen) is having a pretty crummy time, having not been able to write anything worth publishing in many years, and turning to vodka for solace at inappropriate moments, and is about to lose his job. When a new art teacher, Dina Delsanto (Juliette Binoche), irks him at work by suggesting that words fail to capture the important things in life, he starts pushing his students and himself into grand literary pursuits to prove her and her art wrong, and vice-versa. This is, of course, a tired and banal rom-com plot that contrives to throw two superficially different people together with the least possible imagination. However, I did like that their back-and-forth war to prove the value of words or pictures was positively Socratic in tearing each other’s arguments to pieces. By the end of the film, everybody duly and inevitably became better people and decided that words and pictures are both important, and that they loved each other after all. Yawn.

What were great about Words and Pictures were the subplots of personal struggle. While Clive Owen was not believable as a funny-man, he definitely has that twisted, demented vibe about him that made his descent into alcoholism and loss of his son’s respect very moving. I wish they had focused on this more, as it had potential to be up there with Flight (2012). Juliette Binoche, too, is great as a tormented artist, who has all the vision she needs to create masterpieces, but is losing control of her body due to rheumatoid arthritis. Those of us who live with chronic pain know all too well her insensible roars of frustration at simple tasks such as holding a paintbrush, and the pointless suffering along the road to finally realising that your gifts don’t merely come from your hands. Good on them for doing that well, at least.