Review: Words and Pictures

City Paper grade: B-

The title of Words and Pictures refers to a flirtatious “war” between two teachers at a New England prep school, who each argue for the supremacy of their chosen discipline. There’s a more subtle battle happening in the film itself, albeit one between participants with a shared goal: Gerald Di Pego obviously intended his contrived screenplay to be both an old-fashioned romantic comedy and an inspirational drama in the Dead Poets Society mode, while director Fred Schepisi and stars Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche have conspired to make something that more or less achieves those goals in spite of the trite material they’re handed. Schepisi, who emerged from the Australian New Wave of the late 1970s to become a reliable Hollywood journeyman, directs with a deft but subtle hand, eliding the story’s many flaws by steering away focus from the overloaded plot and toward its complicated leads. Owen plays that old type, the once-promising writer turned alcoholic English teacher; Binoche is a renowned artist who turns to teaching when her rheumatoid arthritis interferes with her work. Both transcend their Screenwriting 101 caricatures and create full-blooded, deeply flawed characters whose attraction is founded on ideas and passions. Their bickering repartee is archly written, but the chemistry between them steers the relationship back toward the intended Hepburn-Tracy path. Both are wrestling with the loss of their youthful talents while barely concealing their still-burning passions under a protective layer of cynicism.