The basic plot of Words and Pictures isn’t anything new. A washed-up great — in this case — writer is wasting away at a ritzy boarding school until he finds someone to save him. Hell, the film even uses “O Captain! My Captain!,” the famous opener from the Walt Whitman poem about Abraham Lincoln that got good play in Dead Poets Society, albeit this time as a jocular form of connection between an embattled instructor and a class clown. And although the reuse doesn’t carry as much emotional gravitas as it did in Peter Weir’s 1989 boarding school saga, Words and Pictures does bear fruit. It just comes from different stems, most notably the crisp performances by its able leads and an intermittently sharp script that clearly had some thought put into it.
For What it's Worth 