Lessons from "The Words"

"We all make choices in life. The hard thing is to live with them. And there is nobody who can help you with that."

"At some point, you have to choose between life and fiction. The two are very close, but they never actually touch. They are two very different things."

"Do you think you are not the only person on this earth who has ever made a mistake? Are you going to let this destroy you?"

"I think I am gonna break. I am gonna break in half."

"I won’t let you break."

"If I was to tell you that realization did not cause me pain, I would be lying."

"Don’t screw yourself all your life for one stupid mistake."

"I have done all I can, the best I can. That’s what you can ask of a person."

"Don't you know words ruin everything?"

"The truth shall set you free."

- Dialogues from the Hollywood movie 'The Words' (2012)

(image source: www.cleveland.com)

The Words is a Hollywood movie directed by Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal starring Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldana, Dennis Quaid, Jeremy Irons among others, which is a tale of a struggling writer in New York, who keeps writing manuscripts only to be rejected. When he and his girlfriend holiday in Paris, France, she buys an old briefcase for him from an antique shop. On returning to New York, he finds that it contains an old manuscript, that of a story written by a person. After much consternation, he passes of the same as his own, gets it published and becomes famous. At this moment, he gets to meet an old man, who confronts him with the truth - it is something which he had written and lost. It turns out that the manuscript is the true story of the old man, who had loved and married a lady, only to lose her due to his anger and circumstances. Now, the protagonist is in a dilemma as to whether to go and tell the truth to the world or keep it to himself. He tells the old man that he will mention this to the world, but the old man refutes him saying that he did indeed meet his wife later but she was married to another person by then. The old man points out that people always move on from their mistakes, implying that the writer too will move on from his mistake. There is a story within a story within a story, which can be better appreciated by watching the movie.

This movie hit me a bit hard because it tries to explain as to if you can live a lie and if you can move on from that. If you commit a mistake, can you move on or does it continue to haunt you all the time? I am talking about honest mistakes and not intentional ones. The problem lies in the fact that in case of honest mistakes, you are not aware that you are making them, while in the midst of such mistakes. It is only later that it hits you. Hard, sometimes. The movie shows the protagonist committing a mistake, but while stealing the work, he does not know the person who wrote the manuscript. Since he feels that it was old and the person could perhaps be dead or somewhere in the world unknown to the world, he decides to pass of the work as his own.

I find it very difficult to get over mistakes. They keep haunting me again and again and it takes me time to grow out of them. The problem is that many of these 'mistakes' are very perceptive. What is a mistake to one may not be to another and the gravity of such mistake has an import on the drag it gives to the heart. Mistakes are not as bad as they seem to be. The movie shows the protagonist grappling with the fact that he has indeed stolen someone's work, passed it off as his own and grown famous in the process. But, I believe that mistakes teach the best lessons in life.

Bite the bullet. The first step is to apologise to the person who was at the receiving end of the mistake. it will make you feel better, will take some weight off your chest. In the movie, the protagonist does that immediately on being found out and confronted.

I always believe time is the best healer. Once you try to give it a bit of time, you will be surprised to see how things improve. Try not to focus on the mistake and it will slowly go away from you. Slowly, but surely. The movie does not show whether the protagonist has moved on, but there is a flash to a happy time with the dialogue "we are going to be fine", implying that things could perhaps get better.

The other thing that the movie shows is that the old man forgives the person once he realises the mistake he made. He does not extract his pound of flesh when the writer offers to confess to the world and give him credit for the book.

The movie has some really well written dialogues, some of which I have posted above. The other nice dialogues in the movie are posted below:

"My tragedy was that I love words than I loved the woman who inspired me to write them."

"Whatever he had to do whatever he had to lose, he would seal it off. It was as if by locking the secret of one man’s life forever, he had unveiled another much deeper and darker secret within himself."

"And that’s it. The End. No moral, no comeuppance, no incredible gain of knowledge, other than the belief that one can, after making a terrible mistake in life, continue to live and perhaps, even live well."

"Maybe he can forget, he can work, he can create, but it doesn’t matter, because he will never believe it. He’s robbed himself of the chance to find out. When he goes in public, he can maybe wear the mask of confidence and sophistication, but when he alone late at night, he can’t sleep, because when he closes his eyes, he still sees the face of the old man. Everyone has to sleep at night."

"You may not believe me now, but you will thank me later."

"We can do anything we want; we are grown ups."

"Why would a beautiful, intelligent girl as yourself, want to be something silly as a writer?"

Do you the irony behind this movie? Once it got released, there were allegations that it was similar to the German novel Lila Lila (2004), which was also made into a German movie of the same name (2009). While the directors of the Hollywood movie refuted that, could they live with it, assuming that it was indeed intellectual theft? That's a guess!