Bradley Cooper and Zoe Saldana star as husband and wife in The Words.

Previews for the new movie The Words leave viewers wondering exactly what the movie is about. Usually this means the film is a crime or mystery,abstract or artsy or has such a simple storyline that the filmmakers don’t want to give anything away. The third option was the case for The Words. When I mentioned I was going to see it, a fellow grad student asked me if she was right that the main character steals a book idea from the old man she saw in the trailer. She hit the nail on the head. That one insight was basically the movie’s entire plot.

The film attempts to compensate for a lack of action by following three different storylines. It starts with the author, Clay Hammond, (Dennis Quaid, Beneath The Darkness) reading his new novel to an audience. The book is about a writer, Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper, The Hangover Part II), who plagiarizes his first published novel. The first storyline follows Hammond’s reading, the second is about Jansen’s plagiarizing and the third is the story of the old man (Jeremy Irons, Margin Call) Jansen plagiarized from. The best of the three stories is the third one, which recounts the old man’s experiences as a young soldier in France during World War II when he met a beautiful girl whom he married and had a child with.

Within the first few minutes of the movie, Jansen’s wife Donna (Zoe Saldana, Colombiana) talks about the award he is going to receive for his new novel. You know from the look in his eyes that the guy is guilty of something. The suspenseful classical music and suggestion of something more to all these stories had me waiting for something devastatingly awful to occur, like someone coming across a dead body (I thought this very thing was going to happen in one scene, but instead of a body the man finds a note). To add an attempted layer of excitement, there is a bit of a twist at the end when it is implied that Hammond has based the novel about plagiarism on his own life.

I wondered what audience this movie is trying to target. The Words is a tale of morality. The whole point of the movie is to communicate to the audience that plagiarism is wrong, but I don’t know many people who like being lectured. Perhaps for those who like being subconsciously scolded, the movie will be more than just words.

diversions@umdbk.com