thoughts on The Words (spoilers)

We open on a renowned writer named Clay Hammond (Dennis Quaid) giving a reading in a packed auditorium.  He narrates the story of aspiring writer Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper), who, as the story begins, is told by his father (J.K. Simmons) that he needs to stop asking him for money all the time and get a real job.  Rory winds up working in publishing and marrying his girlfriend, Dora (Zoe Saldana).  The couple honeymoons in Paris, where Dora buys a beautiful leather satchel for Rory secondhand.  When they return to the United States and Rory opens the satchel, he finds an old manuscript.  He types it up on his computer, not changing a word or even correcting the spelling mistakes.  When Dora uses his computer, she finds it and reads it; she tells Rory that it's beautiful, and so different from his usual writing.  His "usual writing" keeps getting rejected by publishers, but they like this one, so he passes it off as his own, winning major awards and getting other, previously rejected, work published.  Everything is going along well until he meets the actual writer of the book (Jeremy Irons), who tells Rory his story.  And so we have a story...within a story...within a story, with Clay narrating first to his audience, then to a grad student/potential lover played by Olivia Wilde, and the writer narrating to Rory.  The main conflicts of the movie, then, are whether the writer or Rory himself will reveal Rory as a plagiarist; what the consequences will be if the truth is revealed; and whether Clay's story is, in fact, a fictionalized confession of the plagiarism.

Rory isn't a terribly likable character.  In one of his very first scenes, he yells at his dad for not believing in his writing career, then laughs in his face when his father offers him a job.  He also desperately, melodramatically yells at Dora at one point before he has made it big that this wasn't how his life was supposed to turn out; she asks how that's supposed to make her feel.  When he eventually tells her that he didn't write his career-making novel himself, he accuses her of knowing all along and just wanting it to have been written by him.  In other words, he blames everyone else for his own shortcomings and mistakes and lashes out at people who have, from what we see, been fairly supportive of him.  Because of this, it's hard to care about what happens to him.  The story that Jeremy Irons tells (which we see play out) also isn't terribly compelling, and it starts too late in the film for us to care about the characters in it, either.  Dennis Quaid and Olivia Wilde have pretty good chemistry, and Clay's narration adds a bit of suspense, but as a whole, the film is kind of a mess, with too many layers and not enough attention paid to any of the characters.