I thought Rory and Clay were the same person, but I just realized...

If Clay is, lets say 50 years old in 2012, and had been writing for lets say 20 years. He would be 30 in 1992 when he met the old man and published "window tears".

18 in 1944, would make the old man 66 in 1992.

I agree, he looks older than 66. But not as old as 80.

I am not sure what's or who's fictional or real, but I agree that the timing does not add up for Clay to be Rory. Nevertheless, Clay was guilty of stealing someone's work as a young writer and passing it off as his own after which he became successful. I believe he must have told his wife about his action and it affected their relationship.

Ultimately,Clay writes "The Words" which is his own story - not someone else's - and it's his truth, emotion and life. To me, the ending means he is telling Dora that he does love her more than his success and regrets making the choice.

This movie is full of cliches, but was thought-provoking. I also thought there were many excellent performances from a surprising cast.

Or...Rory could merely be a 20 years younger self in a story that happened to Clay merely 5 or so years prior.

Like most authors, Clay is masking a lot of details to make it not TOO obvious that he "IS" Rory. If Clay's estranged wife happens to be African American, however, it would be a dead giveaway to Clay's reading public that he's Rory, whose own wife is a woman of color; thus, it's unlikely that Clay's wife is black, but makes Rory's wife a black woman so as to distract the reader from being able to conclude with any certainty that the author is actually writing about himself and his shameful deed (plagiarism.)


Okay folks, show's over, nothing to see here!

Thay can't be the same person since Bradley's living in the now! Look at his clothes and his car and the surroundings. That's not the 90's.

Maybe the event did happen 20 years earlier but in the book he updated it so people wouldn't suspect.

He could have been.

His computer, OTOH, is definitely not as old as that theory would allow. The laptop he was typing on couldn't have been made until long after 1990. It indicates that portion of the story took place in the first decade of the 21st century at the earliest.

Well, I find this plot to be fairly simple. Clay is Rory, and this book he wrote is his only way to express without any possible serious repercussions what he had done. Clay and Dora probably couldn’t handle looking at each the same way after knowing the reality about those words.

And…. I think I have proof to back the fact that Clay could be Rory. There’s a scene in the movie in which you can see Rory thinking in front of the book, computer and other things in his desk. Just behind him, by the side of a few books, you can see two baseballs. One that has the appearance of barely having been used and another which seems very old and heavily used. When Daniela seats on Clay’s desk, she grabs a baseball which is seating by the side of another one. Those two balls are exactly the same ones that Rory always kept by his desk. Another piece of evidence is, when Dora seats on Rory’s lap to kiss him while he’s writing on his computer. During the scene, you can see their kitchen at the right. They have a white coffee boiler on top of their stove. In the scene when Clay goes down to get wine for him and Daniel, he goes by he’s stove and on top of it, theres that same white coffee boiler. And of course, can’t leave out the part when Daniela is looking at the books pages and finds a picture of a woman that seems to be Dora at an old age, about the same as Clay.

All that evidence plus the mysterious conversation between Clay and Daniela, point at the highly probable fact that after years knowing the reality about a book he copied, Clay found a way to tell everything to the world with a fiction cover up.

This movie was incredible and this are all conclusions.