The Words is a story in which Dennis Quaid, who lost his wife, gives a reading of his novel about a writer, Bradley Cooper, who finds and copies Jeremy Irons’ lost novel about losing his wife. Bradley then has enormous literary success from his copied novel but he feels tremendously guilty about this and then loses his wife. Although maybe Dennis Quaid’s novel is really a story in code about how he dealt with his own writing block through plagiarism and then lost his wife. The movie was written by Brian Klugman, and I hope he didn’t steal a screenplay about a writer who lost his wife and wrote about a writer who stole from another writer and lost his wife because, he might lose his wife like the rest of them.
I see why they entitled it The Words, because it takes a lot of them to summarize the plot. In any case the moral is clear: If you plagiarize, you lose your wife (or your husband if that’s what you’ve got). Don’t let this happen to you, no matter how desperate you become at the keyboard. Maybe if you’re single it’s safer to try.
You’d think Bradley Cooper would have stuck to brain enhancing drugs, which was how he overcame his writing block in Limitless. In that movie he didn’t lose his wife either – he wrote a book and got the girl.
The Words is a good portrait of the stresses a writer can endure, and of how tempting it can be to be to seek a quick and dirty path the success. In the end a writer has to live with himself, and his wife has to live with him too. And vice versa. A good movie to watch twice.
It”s a good blog to read twice as well.