Secret Life of Words: Quietly powerful

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Perhaps it's fitting and unsurprising that a small, quiet (Canadian, natch) film about the lingering effects of war, strife and torture was unable to permeate the membrane of spangles and schmaltz that make up the awards frenzy over December releases. But people who stand up and applaud when our presidential hopefuls beat their chest demanding more torture would be well served to acknowledge the longview of becoming indifferent to state-sanctioned violence.

Isabel Coixet (My Life Without Me) revisits the themes of dysfunctional introversion as coping strategy with her third film The Secret Life of Words. Sarah Polley plays Hanna, a Yugoslavian factory worker living a monastic lifestyle of repetition and solitude in grimy Belfast. The factory's manager is so bothered by both her foreignness (at one point hastily mentions "my wife is also... an immigrant!") and her unwillingness to socialize that he forces her to take the vacation she's accrued.

Hanna chooses an out of season resort in northern Ireland during what appears to be monsoon season. But when she overhears that a fellow restaurant patron needs a nurse to tend to the wounded on an offshore oil rigger that's just had a fire, she bails on her holiday. The patient is an American (played by Tim Robbins, chained to a bed and still overacting a bit) who is temporarily blinded and so badly burned and teetering on infection that he cannot yet be moved to a hospital. Because of the accident the rig has been shut down and only a skeleton crew of disparate misfits remains. With no work to do they just wile away the hours until the oil company officially closes them down and they're so excited for some new human interaction (with a beautiful woman, no less) that it is barely noticed that she's a little odd.

The film suffers from a tonal issue similar to that which completely sunk Niki Caro's North Country; there is so much dread in the build-up to what causes Hanna's pathological shyness that for the majority of the film the viewer is left adrift to imagine all the horrible things that could have happened to a woman with an eastern European accent. And the final conclusion, though certainly edifying cannot offer much in the way of emotional release from those dark places. Secret Life provides a few choice reprieves though: the at times heavy-handed but beautiful visuals; Robbins's aggressive charms leading to an oddly effective romantic coda; and the notion that the sparingly used voiceover throughout the film may be the imagined narrative of an aborted fetus -- a very bold move. And Julie Christie brings amazing presence to a brief cameo as a social worker who exists in a parallel seclusion as the de facto archivist of human tragedy.

It's interesting that one of the most memorable lines in the film (which starts with "I am worried that one day I still start crying...") was used by Polley in her subsequent directorial debut Away From Her.

This DVD contains absolutely no extras.

See also: Caché, Ararat, Red Road, The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum, Solaris, Breaking the Waves.