It was supposed to be just a little book. Instead it turns into an international best seller. Words are everything in life…right from wrong, truth from lies….so it seems understandable that an author, Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper) who spends his life angst-ridden, passionately scribing away, told by his parents to get a “Real job” might seize the opportunity to plagiarize an old manuscript in order to prove his real worth.
It’s on his Parisian honeymoon with his wife, Dora (Zoe Saldana) that Rory happens upon an antique briefcase full of yellowed-page-turning, hand-written prose – the type of literary genius Rory knows he can never write. He typically pens “angry young men” genre, not brilliant love sagas of war and peace and loves and
loss. And so he delivers these hand-written pages, perfectly retyped, to his agent (Zeliko Ivanek) right down to the same typos.
For a writer, writing is explaining a life that doesn’t conform to the conventional 9 to 5 but instead beats to the 24/7…the sickness, the need, the desire, only to face the silence and the rejection of a publisher. And it’s in this well-paced, slowly evolving film does a writer [me] watching this story feel haunted and connected to a tale that becomes all too personal. And it’s in this, one wonders if the everyday audience can understand the underbelly of the movie’s message. Miraculously the answer is “yes.” The filmmakers build a story that is so compelling it draws us in, a reel of slow-emotional-motion in order that the viewer can be caught up in the complexities of a novel turned movie. It’s atually and probably best if the audience isn’t reading books in real life.
The overall story will be narrated by Dennis Quaid as Clay Hammond, the third writer, who will [spoiler alert] tell his version of Rory the writer and the old man (Jeremy Irons) to an eager wide-eyed Columbia University student (Olivia Wilde) on how the problem is eventually solved. And soon it becomes very James Frey’s A MILLION LITTLE PIECES. And soon the ‘What if’s’ of the entire story are revealed….what if she hadn’t lost the manuscript? What if they hadn’t been in Paris? What if? What if? And then the screen turns to black, and we
get it. The joke is on us, and the joke is that for a writer, their greatest passion, above all else, is the keyboard,
where they’ll stop at nothing… to be read.
Irons, best known for his role as “Humbert” in Lolita appears now as a yellow-toothed homeless-looking old man, but always taking the role of martyr, always taking the role reflecting in his pain and the one that got away (and often from a bench).
The irony of the film is that no matter how much sympathy it evokes from the popcorn-chomping audience they will be unaware of how ‘inside’ this movie is about a world of New York literati, right down to the
characters (easily recognizable to those who live there and move in those circles.) When Rory wins the Arts & Fellowship award it’s really the Pen Awards and so on… But it doesn’t matter if you know the
world of literary-greats or not, what the viewer takes away is a universal language for love and inspiration and the understanding that often, whether in life or in fiction, words can ruin everything. And so can actions and choices. Three and a half tiaras