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MOVIES | MOVIE REVIEW

Intellectual Dueling at a Prep SchoolClive Owen and Juliette Binoche Star in ‘Words and Pictures’

NYT Critics' Pick

By STEPHEN HOLDEN MAY 22, 2014

Because “Words and Pictures” is a comedy of ideas couched in the format

of a Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn movie, the temptation for some

critics faced with a film that dares to be ostentatiously smart is to blast it

to smithereens. Which more or less describes the critical reaction to the

movie when it was shown last year at the Toronto Film Festival.

After all, aren’t we who write about movies infinitely more

discriminating than the Philistines who make them? How dare the director

Fred Schepisi and the screenwriter Gerald DiPego presume to invent a

credible, stimulating dialogue, set in a high-toned northern New England

prep school where the faculty members delight in playing intellectual

mind games? What do they know? It’s all so “middlebrow,” to use a

popular critical buzzword that reeks of condescension.

Which brings us to the dueling academics, Jack Marcus (Clive Owen)

and Dina Delsanto (Juliette Binoche), who teach at the fictional Croyden

prep school. Jack, a garrulous, combative and alcoholic poet who has lost

his creative mojo, is on the verge of being fired. He is an outspoken

champion of the written word and is fearless about voicing a special

loathing for social media’s reduction of literacy to tweets and text

messages. His rants are witty and impassioned, and the examples he cites

of world-changing literary passages convincingly bear out the truth of his

5/25/2014 Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche Star in ‘Words and Pictures’ - NYTimes.com

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conviction that much has been lost in the era of the instant message.

Dina, the school’s new art instructor, is a painter and hard-nosed

aesthetician who has rheumatoid arthritis. Their verbal skirmishes,

enlivened by an undertone of sexual attraction, are reminiscent of the

battles fought between Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer in the 1970s,

although the issues are different. A question hovering throughout the

movie: “Will they or won’t they?” Or better yet: “When will they?”

“Words and Pictures” has a host of flaws, but the performances by Mr.

Owen and Ms. Binoche have a crackling vitality, and the screenplay’s

strongest moments set off the kind of trains of thought that dedicated

teachers hope to spur in their students. Cantankerous though these two

teachers can be, you would be lucky to have them in your classroom.

Mr. Owen’s portrayal of the poet as a self-destructive, macho

blowhard fighting a losing battle with the bottle is one of the more

compelling portraits of an alcoholic to be encountered in a recent film.

Jack, who will do anything not to lose his job, while refusing to toe the

line, plays a game of chicken with himself in which the odds of a fatal

misstep rise as his public demeanor becomes more disorderly. To buy some

time, he commits a disgraceful act of literary theft that only exacerbates

his self-loathing and his drinking.

Ms. Binoche, playing a female character who makes it a point not to

be ingratiating, either to her students or to her fellow faculty members,

walks a tightrope between dislikable arrogance and principled

inflexibility. The screenplay is as attentive to her condition, whose

symptoms fluctuate, as it is to Jack’s drinking, and you admire the

toughness required to carry out the physical labor of painting large-scale

abstract canvases. The paintings are Ms. Binoche’s, and they’re quite

impressive.

Surrounding and barely supporting these compelling performances is

a rickety narrative structure with subplots that never quite transcend

perfunctory conflict. One involves Jack’s tense relationship with his

college-age son. A more complicated and muddled subplot observes the

5/25/2014 Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche Star in ‘Words and Pictures’ - NYTimes.com

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cruel harassment of an Asian art student (Valerie Tian) by a boorish male

classmate who mistakenly confuses his racial taunts with flirtation.

Jack and Dina’s jousting culminates with a debate in which

arguments that bristled with acute perception in earlier scenes are

rehashed in softer tones and lose their edge. Before it collapses into

something warm and fuzzy and limp, “Words and Pictures” throws out

ideas that are worth pondering.

“Words and Pictures” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It

includes some nude sketches, strong language and sexual situations.

Words and Pictures

Opens on Friday.

Directed by Fred Schepisi; written by Gerald DiPego; director of photography, Ian Baker;edited by Peter Honess; production design by Patrizia Von Brandenstein; costumes by TishMonaghan; produced by Mr. DiPego and Curtis Burch; released by Roadside Attractions.Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes.

WITH: Clive Owen (Jack Marcus), Juliette Binoche (Dina Delsanto), Valerie Tian (Emily),Bruce Davison (Walt), Navid Negahban (Will Rashid), Amy Brenneman (Elspeth Croyden)and Christian Scheider (Tony).

A version of this review appears in print on May 23, 2014, on page C9 of the New York edition withthe headline: Intellectual Dueling at a Prep School.

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