movies

Seven of the most intriguing movies about writers in 2024

27.01.2025

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Reality’s instability and the value of experience are the main topics of movies about writers in 2024. Renowned actors returned to the screen to lead serious conversations with their viewers. 

Nicole Kidman, for instance, played an author twice, while young writer Cairo Sweet, portrayed on screen by Jenna Ortega, faced the fact that she had nothing to write about. Ian Fleming is gaining experience for James Bond stories by watching the characters in the “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” Guy Ritchie’s new movie.

Even though Fleming is not on our list, three of the movies we chose tell the stories of real-life writers and poets — Truman Capote, Samuel Beckett and James Joyce —  and we also review a film about Ukrainian authors of the Executed Renaissance.

A story about an author who invents an alter ego to make fun of the modern industry of literature has a special place on our list.

 

 

American Fiction

  • Country: USA
  • Director: Cord Jefferson

This movie is an amazing adaptation of “Erasure”, a book by American author Percival Everett written in 2001, which is among the key American works of the 21st century.

 

Writer and teacher Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is not satisfied with the fate of books by African-American authors — to stand on a separate shelf in bookstores. Ellison decides to make fun of readers and the entire literary industry by writing a stereotypical “black” book full of grammatical and stylistic mistakes so that it will be called “real” and “not cleaned up.”

 

Ellison has to pretend to be a fictional writer who is hiding from the police. The work becomes a serious contender for a literary award, and Hollywood producers and the police become interested in it.

 

 

Miller’s Girl

  • Country: USA
  • Director: Jade Halley Bartlett

Cairo Sweet, an ambitious young author who plans to devote her life to writing, is played by Jenna Ortega, who has already tried on the role of a schoolgirl writer in the “Wednesday” Netflix series about the Addams family.

 

Bored of her life in a provincial town, Ortega’s character meets a literature teacher who, as is often the case, wrote a book himself. The girl characterizes his work as a “romantic horror,” defining the movie’s genre.

 

The last name in the title is both the name of the literature teacher, Jonathan Miller, played by Martin Freeman, and Henry Miller, the character’s favorite author, one of the most scandalous authors of American literature. It is after his work that the heroine stylizes her school essay, which causes a storm in a quiet provincial school.

 

 

Dance First

  • Countries: Great Britain, Hungary, Belgium
  • Director: James Marsh

A biography of the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, thorough but not always accurate, is presented in the movie. We see Beckett from his childhood and his relationship with his mother, through the war years in France, to his acquaintance with James Joyce, to his recognition and, subsequently, his death.

 

However, the movie turns out to be a rather conservative biography made in all the Hollywood traditions; it cannot be compared to the revolutionary nature of Beckett. The main attraction of the film is the excellent acting of Gabriel Byrne, who played Beckett in his older years, and Aidan Gillen, whose portrayal of James Joyce draws all the attention.

 

 

Feud: Capote vs. The Swans

  • Country: USA
  • Directors: Gus Van Sant, Max Winkler, and Jennifer Lynch

The first season of “Feud,” released a few years ago, dealt with the fight between actresses Bette Davis and Joan Crawford during the filming of the movie “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane,” which sounded the final chord for both prominent actresses.

 

The second season focuses on the feud between Truman Capote and representatives of New York’s “high society” (the writer calls them “swans”), who had a close relationship with him and whose dirty secrets he published stories about and tried to write a book about until the end of his life.

 

In “Feud,” Tom Hollander played the role of the author, and Diane Lane, Chloë Sevigny and Naomi Watts, who plays the wife of American media baron of Ukrainian origin William Paley, played the swans. SPOILER ALERT: Demi Moore’s character becomes the first victim of Truman’s writing: without waiting for the public condemnation that Capote’s text will cause, she commits suicide on the day of publication.

 

 

The Perfect Couple

  • Country: USA
  • Director: Susanne Bier

It may seem that there is not much writing in “The Perfect Couple”, but it is part of the key topic of the series. A woman is exploited by her family and forced to sell both her body and mind. “28 Bestsellers in 28 Years of Happy Marriage” was written to be the financial backbone of the family’s luxurious life on the picturesque island of Nantucket, where Herman Melville’s characters set sail in search of Moby Dick’s white whale.

 

SPOILER ALERT: The plot revolves around the death of the maid of honor for the wedding of the main character’s son, who was at the same time the young mistress of the main character’s husband. The conflict between Kidman’s character and her husband culminates at the presentation of a new book — a public scandal destroys the image of the “perfect couple” that is so well sold (it seems that readers value this image more, and books only make them feel involved). While the advertisers are deciding how to turn it around, Kidman is trying to find her own writing voice in the ashes of family comfort.

 

 

Argylle

  • Countries: Great Britain, USA
  • Director: Matthew Vaughn

“Argylle” is about a writer who seems to be living her own works, and it is somewhat reminiscent of “Romancing the Stone,” where the character by Kathleen Turner was in a similar situation, but Turner’s companion was Michael Douglas, not Henry “Superman” Cavill.

 

The writer in “Argylle,” played by Bryce Dallas Howard, either anticipates or provokes events in the spy world, which attracts the attention of villains and heroes. The reasons for the coincidences between reality and books, as in a real action movie, will change several times, several realities will turn out to be fiction, and several fictions will turn out to be reality.

 

Just like Kidman’s character in “The Perfect Couple,” the author in “Argylle” will have to reassess her life and values and decide what writing means to her.

 

 

Slovo House. Unfinished Novel

  • Country: Ukraine
  • Director: Taras Tomenko

The story of the “Slovo House” might be considered to be equivalent to “Avengers” and “Spiderman.” Not because the Ukrainian writers of the 1920s-1930s had superpowers (although they would have been useful to survive in those times), but because the filmmakers managed to confuse the audience.

 

“The Slovo House” was preceded by a documentary of the same name, which is now available for viewing online. The title was changed several times, and screenings have taken place since 2021, and by the time the film was released in 2024, it seemed as if you might have seen it several times already.

 

There are so many characters in the film that it could really fill a movie franchise or at least a TV series: Mykola Khvylovyi, Ostap Vyshnia, Mike Johansen, Ivan Bahrianyi, Volodymyr Sosiura, Mykhailo Semenko, Les Kurbas, Pavlo Tychyna, Mykhailo Yalovyi.

 

The authors of the film have thoroughly researched the topic and carefully recreated the tragic era, but they also set out to humanize the writers. “Haven’t you seen a classic in his underwear?” Mykola Khvylovyi asks the newly arrived character. And the viewer too. No, we haven’t, and even if we have, it’s not enough. We are waiting for the next films.

 

 

Special mention

Kerouac on screen

This year’s special mention is personal: a five-minute video collage edited by the author of this feature about the very existence in the cinema of references to the cult book “On the Road” by American writer Jack Kerouac. We invite you to watch it using the password “Chytomo.”

 

RELATED: Documentary film “Slovo House”: “Communist heaven” and “crematorium” for writers

 

Copy editing: Joy Tataryn