Words and Pictures (2013)

☆ ☆ ☆

Words and Pictures (2013) – F. Schepisi

On the up side, Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche inhabit their somewhat clichéd characters and bring them to life.  He plays against type as an alcoholic English teacher, nerdy enough to love word games but feeling more and more like a fraud with his poetic inspiration long departed.  She shows us a character it seems like she has played before, a cold professional with high standards who has a secret soft and lovable side, struggling with rheumatoid arthritis that threatens to destroy her art career.  On the down side, these two actors/characters are stranded in a plot that tries to combine Dead Poets Society with, I don’t know, some romance movie (which is not a genre I tend to watch a lot).  They work for a private high school in the US (the film is in English and Owen sports an American accent) and he comes up with the (sophomoric) idea to have a “war” between words and pictures that pits his Honours English class against her Art Honours class (although they do share students).  It doesn’t take long before someone utters the “A picture is worth…” phrase.  There are a few predictable plot arcs (e.g., how long before his self-destructive behaviour threatens his job, his relationships, etc.?) and we do get the expected happy ending (more or less).  And the kids, you know, they get inspired.  I blame director Fred Schepisi who had a string of mainstream hits in the 1980s (Roxanne, Plenty, A Cry in the Dark) but not much of note since.  There may have been something promising here at the start, and some little moments do work, but the whole enterprise ends up rather embarrassingly middlebrow.