A Thousand Words (2012)

A Thousand Words arrived in 2012 already four years stale, a fantasy comedy in which Eddie Murphy, the most verbally gifted performer of his generation, is forbidden from speaking. The premise is a bargain with a Bodhi tree: every word costs a leaf, and when the leaves run out, so does Jack McCall. Murphy headlines alongside Kerry Washington, Cliff Curtis, and the late Ruby Dee, a cast whose diversity is entirely unremarked. They exist. They are present. No thesis attends them, and the film never pauses to consider what any of it signifies. Representation, here, is a matter of staffing.

The picture's spiritual engine is Dr. Sinja, a New Age guru who dispenses serenity and, eventually, the instruction that Jack must make peace in all of his relationships. This lends the proceedings a mild self-help streak, the sort of moralizing that arrives in the third act wearing sandals. The tree itself is a plot device, not an environmental parable. Nobody mentions carbon. Nobody mentions the planet. Squirrels climb it for a tickling gag.

Elsewhere the ledger stays bare. Race is never addressed. Caroline is a conventional wife who walks out over a misunderstanding, and the film offers no gendered commentary beyond that. Jack's mother has dementia, which serves reconciliation and nothing else. The fast-talking literary agent absorbs some gentle mockery, though the film never follows the thought through to any argument about money or class. The result is a movie about a man learning to shut up, assembled by people who could not stop talking. It is a document of almost perfect cultural stillness, and we file it accordingly.