Words and Pictures

**Spoiler Alert**

Director: Fred Schepisi. Starring: Clive Owen, Juliette Binoche, Bruce Davison and Amy Brenneman

Clive Owen plays Jack Marcus, a private school English teacher who is also a writer of minor renown. When he isn't arriving late for school, he is angry with his class for what he sees as their creative torpor. He also edits the school literary magazine, which is in a slump. The school administration and board threaten to stop publication of the magazine due to the modest quality of the content. Jack contends with a slump of his own in his writing life; a fact weighing against him in his fight to retain the school publication. Compounding Jack's professional misfortunes are his drinking problem and a strained relationship with his estranged son, who he rarely sees but with whom he shares awkward phone conversations.

Enter Dina Delsanto (Juliette Binoche), a painter who has enjoyed some acclaim for her work but has left the city to join the faculty at Jack's school as an art teacher. Her reputation for being difficult precedes her and in the first meeting between Jack and Dina, she coldly resists the playful game he enjoys (and which members of the faculty find annoying) where he asks players to come up with multi-syllabled words. The two share some repartee but Dina mostly gives him the cold shoulder.

If Jack's flaw is his drinking, Dina's is more physical; she has rheumatoid arthritis that is growing progressively worse and which interferes with her work. She often tosses her brush or slashes at the canvass in frustration, unable to maintain motor control.

The movie sets up the characters nicely but they are also too familiar: the hard-drinking writer facing an uninspired class and an artist losing her ability to create. There is more than a whiff of cliche here, which is too bad because Owen and Binoche, two excellent actors with enough screen presence to ignite a haystack, deserve better. They manage to distract the audience from the shortcomings of the writing to keep us watching.

As Jack warms to Dina; the two continue to trade multi-syllabic words in the hallway and her class. A mutual-attraction develops. Adding some color to their budding romance is a debate the two agree to stage where they argue the merits of words versus pictures. Both Jack and Dina have respective moments in class where they hope to convince the students of their arguments. Jack tries to impart an appreciation of the power of words, citing the Declaration of Independence ('We hold these truths to be self-evident...') to underscore the impact of his point. That Jack would use the most famous lines of the Declaration is odd, given their hypocritical nature. He seems to forget that words in political documents can sometimes ring false and hollow if they lack the gold-standard of action to support them. For a professor so bright, this seems like a glaring omission but I guess we are supposed to be in awe of Jack's rhetorical brilliance. In class, the students egg on the teachers, with "Mr. Marcus said' and 'Miss Delsanto said;' which are their pointed attempts to create tension for the coming debate.

The film, like it's nuance-challenged title, makes a stab at the cerebral with its various themes related to words, language, pictures and drawings and the failings of all to sometimes effectively convey meaning and emotion. This could have been explored with some depth but like everything in the film, the themes are worn as fashionable garments; desperately grasping at intellectual credibility.

Again, this is too bad because Binoche and Owen share some fun moments with prickly repartee. Dina's struggle with arthritis could have and should have been a tragic, powerful subplot while Jack's eventual disclosure to the school board that he submitted a poem his son wrote to the new issue of the school literary magazine--an act that threatens his job and fractures his newly-established romance with Dina--seems like another unconvincing, mechanical plot contrivance to show he still has some semblance of integrity. As Jack bears accountibility for his ethical breach and addresses his crippling drinking problem, Dina manages to deal with her arthritis.

Many scenes made me cringe, particularly the one in which the class jerk, Swint (Adam DiMarco) greets Jack outside the school with a salute and 'My Captain, My Captain.' This unwelcomingly recalls Peter Weir's unfortunate, equally cringe-worthy Dead Poet's Society. Another is a sequence where Jack smashes his belongings in his home to further express his frustration, which reads more like the director's we-need-to-show-Jack-losing-control memo to Clive Owen rather than unpredictable, unanticipated behaviour.

And when the debate finally arrives, it's a major disappointment, concluding in what seems to be minutes. Nothing of any importance is exchanged; only interesting quotes by notable artists and writers and Jack's platitudinous chatter about how words and pictures are of equal value and importance and blah, blah, blah.

The Owen/Binoche chemistry is incandescent but the script, Schepisi's stubborn sentimentality, and the film's lazy, cotton-candy intellectualism scuttle what promise the movie had. If movies were merely words and pictures, then an infant's haphazard scribblings would serve just as well as a screenplay. Maybe that's what the cast had to work with.