A Word About ‘The Words’

What if a writer committed the ultimate act of plagiarism: copying someone else’s novel and then passing it off as his own, achieving success in the act? That is the intriguing and topical premise of “The Words,” a romantic drama starring Bradley Cooper (“The Hangover,” “He’s Just Not That Into You”) as the author Rory Jansen. What if the same story had been made into a movie by an experienced team of filmmakers that actually knew what it was doing, instead of two newbie writer-directors, Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal? As it is, this feels like a not-even-winning entry for the erstwhile competition “Project Greenlight.” There are a half-dozen good ideas about love, writing and creativity, personal guilt and absolution, truth and fiction. But they are buried under a mountain of literary and art-house pretensions, especially by wholly superfluous layers of parallel stories-within-the-story. Jansen has a stack of rejection letters to show for his initial writing efforts, yet somehow on the salary of a mailroom worker and some help from his crusty working-class dad (J.K. Simmons) is able to live in a spacious Brooklyn studio with his new bride Dora (Zoe Saldana) and take her on a Parisian honeymoon. OK, whatever. There they come across a faded briefcase in a knickknack store which, as Jansen later discovers, contains the typewritten manuscript of a World War II-era novel about a young man who has a tragic love affair in Paris and writes a beautiful novel about it. Faster than you can say “La Vie en Rose,” Jansen has a bestseller, fame and fortune, and an even bigger loft. And a stalker, by the name of, well, just “The Old Man” (Jeremy Irons), whose words those are, we think we know. One question the movie fails to ask is how The Old Man can prove his authorship of the book; couldn’t he have just read it and claimed it as his own? Anyway, after a reading, The Old Man tracks down Jansen at a park bench, and there he picks up the narration of the young man’s story. Which is a blessed relief because Jeremy Irons narrating anything is a huge cut above Cooper or Dennis Quaid doing it. (More on that anon.) From there it is a question of how Jansen will resolve his guilt. Whom will he tell, and whom will he deceive? What will he do to save his precious marriage and loft? And what does The Old Man want? As for Quaid, he is the third layer in the club sandwich – a writer, Clay Hammond, who has written a novel (“The Words”) about an author named Rory Jansen who stole someone else’s novel about someone else who wrote a novel. Are we clear? Olivia Wilde shows up as a grad student who stalks Hammond at a reading to find out whether he is really the guy who stole the novel. We think he did, but it’s left a little fuzzy, as are Wilde’s motives. A whole lot of fuzzy. Plenty of eye candy for girls and boys (Cooper, Wilde, Saldana) makes all this a bit more tolerable, but Cooper is such a god-awful actor he could win my 2012 Keanu Reeves prize. “The Words” is rated PG-13 for brief strong language and smoking. It is playing at Cinerom in Torrington.