Starring Sarah Polley, Tim Robbins. Written and directed by Isabel Coixet. (14A) 119 min. Opens Aug 4.
Adopting an Eastern European accent for the occasion, Sarah Polley re-teams with Isabel Coixet, the Spanish director of My Life Without Me,
for another delicately wrought drama marred by an air of preciousness
but distinguished by a number of deeply affecting scenes. In The Secret Life of Words,
Polley is Hanna, a deaf factory worker who, after being forced to take
a holiday by her boss, becomes a nurse for an injured man on an oil rig
off the coast of Britain. Tim Robbins plays Josef, a worker who was
burned and temporarily blinded in an accident. Hanna's chilly demeanour
melts as she bonds with her patient and with the rig's other lonely
misfits (including Talk to Her's Javier Camara as an overly
experimental cook). The mysteries behind the accident and Hanna's odd
compulsions and painful history are also revealed.
Since John Berger's classic meditation on visual art
Ways of Seeing and the anonymous 17th-century curio
Letters of a Portuguese Nun
-- as well as the very act of storytelling -- take on such significance
in Coixet's story, her sensibility arguably remains more literary than
cinematic. There are also moments when the dialogue seems too
self-consciously eloquent and the images too lyrical. (Who knew life on
an oil rig could be so idyllic?) Yet the film gains power and urgency
as Hanna and Josef show more of themselves. Both Polley and Robbins
have rarely been better as their characters go beyond what words can
express.