My husband and I watched a movie last night, The Words, on the recommendation of two people who I work with at my library.
WARNING: If you’ve never seen the movie, this blog containers spoilers.
The premise is that a writer has written a book he is told is very good but it isn’t garnering him representation or a contract. He has to get a regular job to support himself. On their honeymoon in Paris, his wife buys him an old bag which he later finds has a manuscript in it. It’s a masterpiece. He retypes it and passes it off as his own. Then the old man shows up and tells him he knows what the young man did because it’s his story, but he doesn’t want anything.
This movie didn’t really work for me, for two reasons.
First, I’ve been in a writer’s group for a few years now. All of us would love to make a living at our writing. Hell, we’d love to be bestselling and rich! But, we would continue to write whether we ever sell it or not, because that’s what we do. We write. We’re writers. We want to write and share through our writing. What is the point of selling a piece of writing if it isn’t yours? You’re not a writer, if you do that, you’re a publisher or an agent. We writers live to create. Did he think that if he just published the book he’d suddenly begin writing to that caliber? We all know that’s not going to happen. Good writing takes time and work. The point is not to sell, the point is to create.
Maybe it’s just me, but in his place I think a lot of writers would have rather had the adventure of trying to find the person who actually wrote it.
Second, he says that he’s not where he’s supposed to be in life. That’s not possible. Wherever you are is where you’re supposed to be. Life is a journey. You have to let go of what you thought your life would be in order to find the life that’s waiting for you. Maybe that just sounds like a platitude but it’s what I’ve found to be true and I guess I expect other writers to have that perspective but probably many don’t.
Okay, then you’ve got the whole Dennis Quaid storyline area that just doesn’t work. Supposedly he’s written the book that tells this whole story of the young man’s plagiarism and old man, and he’s reading part of it at an award ceremony. A young woman shows up who seems to know what is going on. Now, if he’d published a novel before to critical acclaim like the one described in this new book, wouldn’t people recognize it instead of just this one girl suspecting that the new book was really what was going on in his own life? Plus, she comes in with this all knowing attitude. How? I don’t think so.
Some of the cinematography was beautiful. There was one shot that I had to go back and look at again, about a third of the way into the movie, with the Fall trees, the street and the sky line fogged in the background. I would love to have that as a picture on my wall. The soundtrack was beautiful too.
In the end, The idea was interesting but the plot was not well executed. I enjoyed it for the acting and the cinematography. 3 stars from me. I am guessing that someone wrote this as a screenplay to be a box office smash with Dennis Quaid and Jeremy Irons. (I went and checked, it was written by the directors. They could have used a good writer’s group to poke holes in it before they turned it into a movie.)
What do you think? Did you see the movie? What about plagiarism? As a writer, what’s the point?
Melora Johnson's Muse 