Much sensitivity, but too much talk
In this offbeat, slow-to-unfold picture (the first hour is hard to get
through by any standard), Hanna, a war-traumatized Bosnian nurse (Sarah Polley) connects with Josef, a burn victim (Tim Robbins) whom she cares for on an oil-rig. We know from frame one that Hanna, who has an unidentifiable foreign accent, is a shut-down personality—her emptiness is presented with a Beckettian rigor. She's a workaholic her coworkers can't stand because she won't relate to them. She's never taken a vacation or a day of sick leave and the manager at the English factory where she bags rolls of plastic (Reg Wilson) implores her to take a long vacation. Unwilling to go anywhere nice, she winds up at a damp seaside town in the wintertime where an overheard conversation leads her to return briefly to her nursing vocation caring for the temporarily blinded and immobile Josef. (Why he's kept on the oil-rig and not immediately evacuated to a hospital--other than its usefulness to the plot development--is hard to fathom, to coin a phrase.) As Hanna, Polley has a great understated role, assuming you buy her somewhat simplistically conveyed accent. The key scenes are those between Hanna and Josef in the cabin where he's being cared for: it's here exclusively that the bond is forged. The filmmakers may have sought to avoid having the drama seem too claustrophobic and limited by moving outside the sickroom to explore the now under-populated oil-rig, which has been shut down since the accident. Minor characters on the rig are well developed—but this somewhat backfires, since their variety only underscores how blank Josef and Hanna are to each other and to us for a lot of their screen time, just as the charm of some crew members highlights how painfully awkward and at times rather generic efforts at sincerity and reserve are in many of the the Robbins-Polley sequences. Fact is that Polley's character is a blank through most of the picture, and despite seemingly being more forthcoming, Robbins' doesn't reveal much ever—except for a family trauma and a secret behind the accident. Who he is otherwise we never learn: developing him might have been a better way to spend our time than conversations with the cheerful chef, the crusading but neurotic oceanographer, the stoical captain, the gay couple, etc. Hanna loosens up with Josef a little too suddenly, for all the slow buildup. It would be nice if the screenplay had made her shift more gradually. As the patient, Robbins hams it up a bit, but what else can he do? His job is to appear to be loosening her up. In the movie, an inability to enjoy life is signified by a lack of interest in food, and Simon (Javier C. 
I almost feel asleep watching this movie
The secret life of words is an extremely boring and pretentious
movie.Isabel Coixet,the director,thought she was making an excellent piece of art and it's easy to note it.This movie bored me a lot.I almost feel asleep during a long time of this movie.I cannot understand how two actors like Sarah Polley and Tim Robbins participated on this pathetic film.The secret life of words is one of the most boring movies on last years.If you wanna sleep,see this movie.I lost 115 minutes of my life watching this piece of crap,so do not make the same mistake as me. Rating:3. |
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