Review of Words and Pictures (2014) by Ginak — 20 Sep 2014

If you set a film at a prep school and picture basically obedient, ideally brought up students, this is about as good as you can manage to get. The debate, although kind of fudged at the end, was reasonably good (given the setting and all those unrealistically nice young people), but the main symbolic characters, other than the one played by Juliette Binoche, were pretty cliché.

I admire Clive Owen for trying, but his drinking was not really convincing and frankly as a former English major, I found him a bit insulting and over the top. Not all – or most of – literature is edifying.

Much of it is very dark actually. Binoche had the far easier character – she was made cold by real physical suffering – something no one made much of – no one asked why this great painter was stricken (told you there were very few dark thoughts in here), but Binoche was convincing in her depiction of the pain and frustration of her disease and also quite good at being curt and insulting, but after all, she is French.

It is to Schepsi’s discredit that he chose this setting for his debate, but to his credit that the film worked at all and nobody threw any shoes at the screen. I guess we felt sorry for the actors who did a great job considering what they had to work with.