The Secret Life of Words is a truly international production — the writer-director, Isabel Coixet, is Catalan, and it stars (if that’s the right word for such unegotistic, unglamorous performances) the Canadian Sarah Polley and the American Tim Robbins, with the rest of the cast drawn from across Europe. This is appropriate, because it’s mostly set on an oil-rig in the middle of the sea, and oil rigs tend to be international productions too. It is also one of those films that only Europeans (or perhaps Iranians) seem to make nowadays. Not even an “indie” American director would start the story so slowly, so flatly, and have the patience to let it build almost imperceptibly. For the first 40 minutes or so of the movie, it teeters on the edge of being boring — just because it is so understated and unflashy.
Polley plays Hanna, an Eastern European woman who is deeply withdrawn — and it’s not just because she has a hearing problem. She appears to have no friends or family around, she hasn’t taken a holiday from her factory job for four years, she makes silent calls to someone and she is secretive about herself. The movie begins with her being told to take a holiday by her boss, and off she goes, rather reluctantly, to a bed-and-breakfast in Ireland. But she doesn’t have to suffer much holidaying: when she hears a man discussing an oil rig fire that has left its sole survivor so badly burnt that he cannot be moved, and saying he needs a nurse, she jumps at the opportunity.
The burnt man, Josef, is played by Robbins. He is temporarily blind too, so he can’t see the woman sent to nurse him. He probes at his silent, unseen nurse, almost as if he intuits that she needs drawing out. He’s an intelligent man, with a complicated romantic history, and Robbins does an amazing job of displaying Josef ‘s charisma and persistence even amid his pain. Polley, for her part, is extraordinary: this almost-silent, withdrawn woman can’t have been easy to portray on screen, but Polley is entirely convincing, and ultimately very moving. When I saw The Secret Life of Words, I hadn’t quite absorbed the information that this Canadian actor was in the lead, and in the course of the movie I forgot that she wasn’t a wounded East European woman playing herself.
The deliberate, underplayed build-up gives the movie a very convincing sense of realism. These feel like real lives, with all the fraying stuff at their edges, all their loose ends — the hints at the periphery of the story work to give us the feeling that they are not just movie characters who will disappear when the film’s over. It feels as though they have lives beyond the frame of the film, and they feel fully individuated — which is rare in movies generally, because they rely on stock characters with a greater or lesser amount of new seasoning.
There is a strange voice that pops up a few times, a sort of voice-over from another world or from within Hanna’s troubled psyche. It seems to be the rationale for the title (a confusingly near relative of the late-1970s book and documentary, The Secret Life of Plants, and Stevie Wonder’s musical response to that), but its import is not made entirely clear. This is one of the movie’s few flaws, which appear chiefly towards the end, as Coixet wraps it all up.
When explanations are required, Julie Christie and her Danish accent are brought on to provide them. This is awkward in purely narrative terms, and one wonders how badly such direct explanation was needed, but it does fill in some detail — and makes the point of the movie abundantly clear. Then The Secret Life of Words threatens to become rather sentimental in its final resolution, but it gets away with it because the rest is so strongly naturalistic and so powerful — and because we now truly care about these people and their lives, secret or not.