In The Secret Life of Words, one of the best films you’ve never heard of, Spanish director Isabel Coixet, guides Tim Robbins and Canadian actor, Sarah Polley, in roles of a life time, to an exploration of human suffering and human redemption quite unlike anything I have ever seen. Without a frame of bomb blasts, bayonet thrusts or corpse strewn fields The Secret Life of Words brings us one of the truest, most powerful –because most personal– indictments of war ever done on film. And under nearly impossible circumstances — most of it shot at a hospital bed where Josef (Robbins), his flesh burned, an arm fractured and blinded by seared cataracts, is nursed by a strange, morose, nearly speechless young woman Hannah (Polley) who, when she speaks, is clearly a foreigner and doubly an object of mystery and puzzlement. To bring the setting even further from the mass chaos of war, this bed is on an oil rig in the Irish sea with only 5 other people aboard, the rest having been evacuated following the disastrous oil fire which injured Josef and, as we learn, killed his once best friend.
The film begins so oddly and continues long enough oddly that one, especially watching in a home setting, is tempted to get distracted, turn to other things, write it off. It pays back enormously to follow through, let the puzzlement float until the trajectory begins to be seen. The quirkiness of the beginning, which continues throughout, is the disarming normalcy through which great depths are visited. Hannah works in an enormous, loud, plastics plant, not specifically sited, though somewhere in Europe. She is an outsider, by her accent, her hearing aid assisted deafness — which she keeps off as she desires– her somber, depressive demeanor. Her non-attentive dress and make up, except for strange amounts of bar soap, one of many object-metaphors in Coixet’s lexicon, add to her public signing of wishing, completely, to be left alone.
Early in the film she is called in by her manager who says, despite Hannah’s fears, that she is such a perfect worker the company wouldn’t think of firing her. She must, however, to ease the concerns of her colleagues and the trades-unions, take some time off, so as not to imply that workers need only work. She clearly doesn’t know what to do or where to go and winds up in a hotel room as plain as her own lodgings — far from the palm trees and beaches suggested by her manager. Still at a loss as to how to “vacation” she overhears of a need for a burn-trauma nurse and volunteers for the duration of her holiday. She is trained, she tells the doctor, and has seen terrible things. She is helicoptered out to the oil rig where she takes over full time care of Josef; the doctor departs (“Give me a call in case of trouble”) and leaves her with Josef and the 5 other crewmen.
Josef can’t see through his clouded corneas. He is painfully burned on his face, shoulders and much of his body which we never see below the blankets. Yet in his pain, barely able to keep up his patter as she changes his bandages and applies compresses to the burns, he is irrepressible. It’s unclear if he is meant to be a brougish Irishman –Robbins keeps his American accent –yet there is much of the roguish, suggestive bawdiness of an irrepressible story-teller and a man who has not known no from too many women. (more…)
