Review of The Secret Life of Words (2005) by Kyle G — 15 Aug 2012

With a Spanish director (Isabel Coixet); a Canadian actress (Sarah Polley) and American actor (Tim Robbins); a background in Yugoslavia, most of its run-time in Northern Ireland, and an end in Copenhagen... THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS has quite the international tang about it. And with a screenplay about food, music, living, recovery, and love, it's a tall order all around. I don't think it completely covers every part of that order; but, hey, you can't win 'em all.

The story of a torture-traumatized nurse tending to a life-traumatized young man will of course be trite occasionally; it's over- and under-dramatized at weird times, not always the right ones; it's melodramatic in an awkwardly subtle, sometimes confusing, way. But Isabel Coixet shows us everything with such tireless verve and precision that I think she's finagled some kind of success out of it.

Hanna (Sarah Polley) is a Yugoslavian factory worker who's summoned by chance to be a private nurse for an "accident" victim on an offshore oil rig. Josef (Tim Robbins) is burned, blinded, and bedridden. The crew are few, since the rig is under investigation, but there's a good-natured cook, a kind old captain, and several roustabouts. Gently and very naturally touring a small space like this seems like an easy way to build a movie, but Coixet does some interesting things: uses crooning jazz and sad folk-pop smartly; eases from food to music, and back again; and develops each character in a cool way, drifting back and forth between them, etc.

And while at times the film approaches belaboring its main theme (people's ceaseless pursuits to be heard and understood), I like when it brings in Hanna's past as a terrible refugee. Far from aggravating the maudlin elements already on show, this rises so far above them that it makes an intelligent and humble coup de grace. An amazing (but, in another sense, dreadful) motif I saw... to count how many waves hit the ship (at present, the crew's science-geek mismatch's main task -- trivial, comic)... or to count how many screams till a butchered woman dies (Hanna's reminiscence of when she and a group of women were tortured during the Bosnian war -- horrifying, crucial)... or just to talk without knowing if the other person is even hearing you.