Sarah Polley rejoins writer-director Isabel Coixet in The Secret Life of Words, an immersive, bittersweet ‘sleeper’ about the damaged emotional interior of an oil rig nurse. JACOB POWELL reviews.


PARTIALLY deaf girl, Hanna (the luminous Sarah Polley), lives a life of monotonous and comforting routine. She works at a local plastic wrap factory, she lives alone, she never takes a day of leave, and most of all, she never really connects with anyone. Using her hearing aid to help serve this latter purpose, she regularly turns it off, thereby causing the unheeded world around her to fade away into the background. Into this muted realm of detachment director Isabel Coixet takes us; tentative intruders looking through a one way mirror and not understanding the beautiful and disparate elements before us. A slow-burn, bittersweet story with an aesthetic depth to easily immerse oneself in, Isabel Coixet’s The Secret Life of Words may well be one of my sleeper picks for Festival 2007.

Forced by her employers to take a month’s leave, Hanna foregoes the suggested sand and palm trees for the mundane simplicity of a nondescript seaside motel. On the first day of her solo holiday, through a twist of circumstance, she ends up taking the temporary post of nurse on a nearby, offshore oil rig. Closeted in close proximity with a few other solitary souls Hanna slowly emerges from out of her interior world and begins to find connection as part of this unlikely group. Her key counterpoint is patient, Josef, a sociable and forward American rig worker temporarily blinded and suffering major burns from an accident (portrayed by an authentically jaded feeling Tim Robbins). In each other they discover a source of understanding where they can begin to release their grip on their deepest shame and hurts.

The Secret Life of Words could have been two different films, using the same actors and characters, thatched together into a contrasting mellifluous whole. During the first half the mood of the movie is as hazy as the mist and clouds that permeate the screen; as mysterious as its quietly solemn subject. Coixet gives virtually no background information about her tight-lipped protagonist; begrudgingly letting small titbits go as the dialogue requires it. Enjoying the mystery, I thought the film might centre around the exploration of Hanna’s interior existence as she tenuously moved through the concrete world of the oil rig, reminiscent, in ways, of Lodge Kerrigan’s Keane (2004). However this was not to be. The Secret Life of Words’ back end funnels the plot through a sharply focused narrative which highlights Hanna’s previously ambiguous behaviour and motivations. Yet this is no Shyamalanesque serpentine thriller, designed to impress us with its cleverness. Rather the interplay of relationships is what counts here; specific plot details serve only to give these interactions context and weight without overtaking them. The movie centres on the hope of rediscovery when life has buried, beyond sight, your very person.

Credit has to go to both Polley and Robbins who show restraint, communicate ably, and share a palpable onscreen chemistry. Polley’s slow and painful character solidification is particularly arresting to observe. Production closely supports this with light, sound, setting, weather – the complete visual and aural tone of the film – mirroring this shift of interior/exterior balance. At first I was a little disappointed by this transition, but Coixet resists the temptation to over dramatise – even the most emotive scene, in which all scars are bared, is relatively pared back from what it could have been. With the exception, perhaps, of the film’s resolution. Finding a relational re-entry point into life will by no means remove the scars this life has left. Coixet and editors might have been better advised to opt against a high level of resolution by cutting the last few scenes. Regardless, they do manage to maintain a certain level of ambiguity in which we find room to ask questions and explore the thematic matter on our own terms.