The Secret Life of Words is writer/director Isabel Coixet’s solemnly captivating film about the raw and tender love between two people whose bodies have been assaulted and whose souls have been tortured and stripped bare. Hanna (Sarah Polley) is a young factory employee with a perfect track record, forced on holiday after coworkers complain she is difficult to deal with. Hearing impaired, rarely using the aid she wears because there is not much she wants to listen to, Hanna lives a solitary life of work, identical meals, and evenings of embroidery.
While on holiday, she seeks work as a nurse aboard a European oil rig. Josef (Tim Robbins), who’s been severely burned and temporarily blinded in an accident, becomes Hanna’s crass and brutish patient. He is intent upon knowing the details of Hanna’s life; she is more than reluctant to give them, but somehow, through story telling and the common bond of physical infirmity, the two share their intimate and secretive pasts.
Polley is brilliant here, but she comes precariously close to outshining Robbins, who’s been given an unfair disadvantage in the film’s writing. His character is (of course) limited physically, confined to bed and without vision, but there is also a lot to be desired of Josef’s story. Since The Secret Life of Words centers around the sharing of secrets, formerly too painful to tell, it’s important that both Hannah’s and Josef’s harbored pasts be believable and unforeseen. His is neither.
I’m not sure what Coixet wanted to achieve with the film’s supporting characters. There are many moments where the rig’s employees paint a satisfying backdrop to the intensity between Hanna and Josef, but there are other places in the film, including an entire musical montage, where it’s suggested that the crew should be just as carefully considered as the nurse and her patient. I found myself asking, more than once, “Should I care about these characters?”
There is an ambiguous narrator at the movie’s beginning and end – a furtive, childlike commentator that invades the silence in and around Hanna in two very different scenes. Since the relationships in this film are already so fragile and tenderly formed, I hardly see the need of this additional presence – the dynamic between Josef and Hanna is haunting enough without the child’s weighty, nonessential monologues.
Overall, The Secret Life of Words is a quietly compelling escape into a contemplation of loss, independence, unity, and the shame of survival. There are places where the plot is shallow, others where it seems to float on a bit too much faith in the happenstance, but the movie’s end is satisfying enough to overwrite all of the awkwardness.
Liz Licorish
Comments Directed to: LizFlix@gmail.com
Published June 23, 2007
