Clive Owen has a bit of the Nick Cage about him. They are both tan. They are both white men in their forties (I thought about fact-checking that but realized that no matter what the number actually is, these men will be forever forty). They both have deep voices. Not the Johnny Cash/John Wayne kind of deep"”no more than a hint of scotch and cigar grittiness. But not the pure baritone of a Morgan Freeman or a James Earl Jones"¦obviously.
Owen has been pegged to action roles perhaps slightly more than Cage, but they overlap quite a bit. The relationship between the two is like one of the older smaller English banking houses with offices in New York and London.
The biggest difference between the two is Nicolas Cage's intense weirdness. He's like the odd older brother who had to suffer as the guinea pig of New Age parents.
Instead, Clive Owen keeps his madness under lock and key. If he had been a little weirder, if he were just a hair closer to the abyss, it might have saved Words and Pictures, a romantic comedy that is both so oblivious and earnest that it should make you cringe.*
The latest feature from veteran director Fred Schepisi is about an English teacher (Owen) and an art teacher (Binoche) who both struggle with some problems. They meet each other, and there's chemistry (although it's not at the AP level"¦YET!!!!1!).
Things heat up when the two start talking trash on each other's chosen medium in class, and from then on it's war between"”you guessed it"”words and pictures!
The problem doesn't have anything to do with the chemistry"”Juliette Binoche is incredible as always and Clive Owen, while not taking many risks, is fine. One example of the problem is in the school scenes.
Anyone who has ever gone to high school can tell you that an actual, earnest dialogue between class and teacher is a rare exception to the routine of fart jokes, passing notes, day dreaming, and bureaucratic lectures. The kids are so willing to engage with their professors that I was scared. This would have been a great start to a John Wyndham dystopian sci-fi adaptation but not so much to an engaging romantic comedy.
The serious treatment of art and writers block won't end any scholarly debates, but it will provide artists and thinkers in the audience a chance to reflect about their own output.
This isn't a terrible movie. If you're bored and looking for a date night, it wouldn't be worse than, I don't know, giving up on the relationship. It's nowhere near the greatness of Enough Said and About Time, two great alternatives in recent memory.
In the end, the picture that stays with you is of the faculty break room. What break room has a Keurig machine and freshly made croissants?! Ridiculous.
*The rebuttal of all this would be to say that I'm a disaffected millennial who can't stomach anything but sarcasm, bitterness, and irony. Which would be kind of correct. But I cried in the last Harry Potter movie and in About Time, so"¦
