Set at a conference for \u201cthought leaders,\u201d \u201cThe Way We Speak\u201d is an ambitious drama that puts its cameras on a handful of characters wading into an arena of intellectual combat while dealing with personal challenges that threaten to unravel them. The performances are uniformly excellent. That all the key players (save for the lead) are not yet in-demand names is even more impressive. They carry themselves\u00a0like stars (or known-quantity character actors) even if we don\u2019t know them.<\/p>\n
Faith versus Reason is the main attraction: a middle-aged writer named Simon Harrington (Patrick Fabian of \u201cBetter Call Saul\u201d) who is finally starting to have a breakthrough is brought in to have a series of debates over three days with another rationalist, his longtime best friend and colleague George Rossi (Ricco DiStefano). When Rossi bows out due to health problems, Simon ends up squaring off against a last-minute replacement, Sarah Clawson (Kailey Rhodes), a young Christian essayist whose latest book has sold over a million copies.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Offstage, Simon has an unsteady and sometimes heated relationship with his wife Claire (Diana Coconubo, possibly the cast\u2019s MVP, at least in terms of the role\u2019s degree of difficulty). She\u2019s a\u00a0famed medical researcher who has been in cancer treatment for years and is a rock for Simon even though her body is betraying her and she\u2019s worried about survival. Simon, already a prickly sort and a drinker as well, begins to crack while worrying\u00a0about his sick friend and sick wife\u00a0and his own career ambitions. He increasingly\u00a0views Sarah not just as his opponent but his enemy, creating a ripple effect of ill-will that impacts other characters and makes the conference tense.<\/p>\n
Written and directed by Ian Ebright in his feature debut, \u201cThe Way We Speak\u201d has already been compared to the work of Aaron Sorkin. The comparison fits not just because nearly every single person in the story is fantastically, at times theatrically, eloquent, but because the structure, look, and tone channel the underappreciated \u201cSteve Jobs,\u201d a Sorkin-penned, Danny Boyle-directed movie set around three product launches. As it turns out, this movie has a lot of the virtues of a Sorkin joint, in particular a gift for snappy patter and keen insight into the dynamics of relationships between smart, accomplished, ambitious people. However, it also has some of the flaws, chiefly an overconfidence in its ability to articulate the big ideas and timeless themes that are believed to be hallmarks of Important Drama.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The content of Simon and Sarah\u2019s onstage clashes is so basic as to seem beneath an institute lauded in the screenplay as a gathering place for the world\u2019s brightest minds. The debates don\u2019t go much deeper than an intro class. \u201cHow can you justify a righteous deity that allows so much suffering to play out without direct intervention?\u201d is one of the questions posed by Simon, in a self-satisfied tone (like so much of what he offers) that suggests he believes this will be a knockout blow. When it comes to cinematically representing the substance of the faith and\u00a0reason dialectic, Ingmar Bergman or Terrence Malick this film ain\u2019t.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Set at a conference for \u201cthought leaders,\u201d \u201cThe Way We Speak\u201d is an ambitious drama that puts its cameras on a handful of characters wading into an arena of intellectual combat while dealing with personal challenges that threaten to unravel them. The performances are uniformly excellent. That all the key players (save for the lead) …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[45],"class_list":["post-1452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drama-movies","tag-drama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1452\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}