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Secret Life of Words, The
Universal // Unrated // May 8, 2007
List Price: $29.98 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
I put off watching The Secret Life of Words for nearly a month. I don't know how many reviewers there are who read these, but for those who don't know, reviewing a good movie is a hundred times harder than reviewing a bad movie.
When something is bad, you know it instantly. It's easy to point out when the direction is awful or the script makes no sense or characters are inserted without any rhyme or reason. Hyperbole is easy, too. "It's the worst thing I've ever seen." "Dear God, please strike down the people responsible for this film."
And so it took me a while to watch The Secret Life of Words, a quiet, meaningful picture about pain and loss and the price of happiness.
Written and directed by Isabel Coixet, the bulk of the film takes place on an oil rig after a devastating fire. The opening scene of the movie shows us the fire in short bursts of action, just seconds long. It's a beautiful way to show how time stops during a disaster. The last we see, Josef (Tim Robbins) is yelling "No!" and rushing toward the flames.
Hanna (Sarah Polley) is a factory worker who doesn't talk and doesn't wear the required earphones everyone else does. Her job is repetitive, as is the rest of her life. She doesn't have to think, because it's all done by rote, and you can tell that - quiet though she is - the last thing she wants to do is think too hard.
She eats the same things at every meal. She cross-stitches the same picture over and over again, just to throw the results away. She calls someone without speaking, gets letters that she never opens.
When her boss tells her she must take a vacation after four years of never missing a day of work, she wonders angrily if she's done something wrong. Will she be fired? The manager assures her, the job is hers, but she must take a break by union rules.
Rather than run away to an island somewhere, she visits a quiet seaside town and we're treated to a glimpse of her mysterious pain after checking in to the Whelan Hotel. She puts her clothes in her room before violently attacking the bed. She sits by the shore outside the hotel and in the distance we can see the smoke rising from the rig.
The next we see of her, she's eating dinner at a Chinese restaurant - nice for her as her meals back home consist of white rice and chicken. A man at another table talks loudly into his cell phone about needing to find a nurse. Hanna approaches him and tells him she is a nurse.
He takes her, via helicopter, to the rig where she will care for Josef - burned badly in the fire - until he can be moved to a hospital on shore.
Josef and Hanna are similar in many ways, we find throughout the film. Both hold a shame and a pain, though Hanna masks hers with silence while Josef asks questions and talks around his.
Blinded by the fire, Josef is inquisitive about Hanna, who will not even surrender her name to him.
"What's your name?" he asks while using a bedpan. "I suppose that now you're holding my dick and I'm pissing in front of you we could call each other by our first names, maybe even start a new life together, get married, have a couple of kids."
He imagines her name is Cora, after a story he's read about a nurse, and says he thinks she is blonde (guessing correctly) because her voice sounds like a blonde. She tells him he can call her Cora...and that she's a red-head.
The oil rig is mostly deserted after the fire with just a skeleton crew working. The cook tries to interest Hanna in food, but she resists, caring only to take his exotic Italian fare to Josef.
When Josef questions her about foods she likes, she lists her three foods - chicken, rice and apples - which infuriates Josef. He's done eating and tells her just to give him his pain medicine, clearly angry that she holds so much back from him.
Outside, she eats his leftovers ravenously. It's the first moment of change we see in her, spurred on by Josef, who is uniquely capable of penetrating her emotional shell.
We learn bits and pieces about the rest of the crew, though they are really mirrors off of which Hanna (and to a lesser extent Josef) are allowed to reflect and grow.
Hanna's friendship with Simon, the cook, gives us a glimpse of someone who used to be fun inside. His childish jokes, and possible crush, spark something in Hanna. Smiles, briefly, and even a little laughter.
Martin, the oceanographer, brings her hope and it becomes clear that Hanna is mired in despair. Seeing others struggle with hopelessness, but refusing to yield, clearly inspires her. Martin is there to count the number of waves that hit the oil rig, to quantify the pressure on the structure.
It's not long before we learn that Hanna is dealing with the memory of a similar counting, the event that brings her such shame and has closed her off to the world.
But that comes in her interactions with Josef. At first pained and silent, their moments together become friendly and happy before delving into something deeper. Josef tells her of his childhood and a father who nearly drowned him in the middle of the sea, knowing he could not swim. Hanna tells him of her past and while the details are easy to guess, the circumstances are less so.
Hanna refuses to tell where she's from, until Josef finally breaks through, and then it comes out in a torrent - detail after detail she's only hinted at - now laid bare.
And that's what this movie is really about. So often we love someone and then lay ourselves out for them to see. Josef and Hanna take the opposite route - exposing their horrors so that they can love. She reveals her scars, literal and figurative, to Josef and he holds her close, both of them weeping.
Hanna gets Josef transferred off the rig, but when they put him in the ambulance, she leaves him, returning to her home and job and routine while Josef heals.
Given her bag after checking out, he follows the letters in the bag to counselor Inge (Julie Christie), who tells him more and warns him away from Hanna. She offers him a chance to know more about her horrors, but he refuses. Instead he finds Hanna and asks if they can go away together.
She tells him she fears that if they did, someday, she would cry and cry and not be able to stop. That her tears would fill the room and drown them both.
"I'll learn to swim," he tells her. "I swear."
Our last look is at Hanna in a house, sitting alone and listening for her children to return from outside, mirroring the suggestion Josef made during their first meeting.
The Picture
Shown in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, The Secret Life of Words is a sparse and beautiful film. The transfer is clean, though the colors are muted, more as a servant of the script than in any failing of the technology. Only once did I see a problem with a delay between scene changes, it lasted just a second and didn't detract from the experience.
The Sound
The 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround sound is fine, really coming through in the scenes when the waves roll heavily against the legs of the oil rig. Polley speaks with an accent that isn't hard to understand, but if needed, subtitles are available.
The Extras
Here's a short story about that: No. There aren't any extras. The scene selection module is spare. There are no audio commentary tracks and no featurettes, which is a shame. I would very much have liked to know more about the source material and some historical background for reference.
The Case
The case is an unspectacular plastic case with two snaps on the side. A small booklet is included inside, but it's shilling for HD DVD and has nothing to do with the movie.
In Other Words...
I have rarely seen a better film than The Secret Life of Words. It is earnest without being sappy in the least, the storytelling is spare and riveting, with small actions paying great dividends as the film continues. There is humor, but always with the underlying question of what happened and why are these characters so damaged.
If this was just a movie review, I'd put it in the hall of fame, but as a DVD review, this has problems. The good-looking movie is accompanied by no extras at all, which means it gets just a Recommended rating. Watch this, however you can see it, but let's wait until a better version of the DVD - perhaps with bonus materials or a commentary - comes along.
When something is bad, you know it instantly. It's easy to point out when the direction is awful or the script makes no sense or characters are inserted without any rhyme or reason. Hyperbole is easy, too. "It's the worst thing I've ever seen." "Dear God, please strike down the people responsible for this film."
And so it took me a while to watch The Secret Life of Words, a quiet, meaningful picture about pain and loss and the price of happiness.
Written and directed by Isabel Coixet, the bulk of the film takes place on an oil rig after a devastating fire. The opening scene of the movie shows us the fire in short bursts of action, just seconds long. It's a beautiful way to show how time stops during a disaster. The last we see, Josef (Tim Robbins) is yelling "No!" and rushing toward the flames.
Hanna (Sarah Polley) is a factory worker who doesn't talk and doesn't wear the required earphones everyone else does. Her job is repetitive, as is the rest of her life. She doesn't have to think, because it's all done by rote, and you can tell that - quiet though she is - the last thing she wants to do is think too hard.
She eats the same things at every meal. She cross-stitches the same picture over and over again, just to throw the results away. She calls someone without speaking, gets letters that she never opens.
When her boss tells her she must take a vacation after four years of never missing a day of work, she wonders angrily if she's done something wrong. Will she be fired? The manager assures her, the job is hers, but she must take a break by union rules.
Rather than run away to an island somewhere, she visits a quiet seaside town and we're treated to a glimpse of her mysterious pain after checking in to the Whelan Hotel. She puts her clothes in her room before violently attacking the bed. She sits by the shore outside the hotel and in the distance we can see the smoke rising from the rig.
The next we see of her, she's eating dinner at a Chinese restaurant - nice for her as her meals back home consist of white rice and chicken. A man at another table talks loudly into his cell phone about needing to find a nurse. Hanna approaches him and tells him she is a nurse.
He takes her, via helicopter, to the rig where she will care for Josef - burned badly in the fire - until he can be moved to a hospital on shore.
Josef and Hanna are similar in many ways, we find throughout the film. Both hold a shame and a pain, though Hanna masks hers with silence while Josef asks questions and talks around his.
Blinded by the fire, Josef is inquisitive about Hanna, who will not even surrender her name to him.
"What's your name?" he asks while using a bedpan. "I suppose that now you're holding my dick and I'm pissing in front of you we could call each other by our first names, maybe even start a new life together, get married, have a couple of kids."
He imagines her name is Cora, after a story he's read about a nurse, and says he thinks she is blonde (guessing correctly) because her voice sounds like a blonde. She tells him he can call her Cora...and that she's a red-head.
The oil rig is mostly deserted after the fire with just a skeleton crew working. The cook tries to interest Hanna in food, but she resists, caring only to take his exotic Italian fare to Josef.
When Josef questions her about foods she likes, she lists her three foods - chicken, rice and apples - which infuriates Josef. He's done eating and tells her just to give him his pain medicine, clearly angry that she holds so much back from him.
Outside, she eats his leftovers ravenously. It's the first moment of change we see in her, spurred on by Josef, who is uniquely capable of penetrating her emotional shell.
We learn bits and pieces about the rest of the crew, though they are really mirrors off of which Hanna (and to a lesser extent Josef) are allowed to reflect and grow.
Hanna's friendship with Simon, the cook, gives us a glimpse of someone who used to be fun inside. His childish jokes, and possible crush, spark something in Hanna. Smiles, briefly, and even a little laughter.
Martin, the oceanographer, brings her hope and it becomes clear that Hanna is mired in despair. Seeing others struggle with hopelessness, but refusing to yield, clearly inspires her. Martin is there to count the number of waves that hit the oil rig, to quantify the pressure on the structure.
It's not long before we learn that Hanna is dealing with the memory of a similar counting, the event that brings her such shame and has closed her off to the world.
But that comes in her interactions with Josef. At first pained and silent, their moments together become friendly and happy before delving into something deeper. Josef tells her of his childhood and a father who nearly drowned him in the middle of the sea, knowing he could not swim. Hanna tells him of her past and while the details are easy to guess, the circumstances are less so.
Hanna refuses to tell where she's from, until Josef finally breaks through, and then it comes out in a torrent - detail after detail she's only hinted at - now laid bare.
And that's what this movie is really about. So often we love someone and then lay ourselves out for them to see. Josef and Hanna take the opposite route - exposing their horrors so that they can love. She reveals her scars, literal and figurative, to Josef and he holds her close, both of them weeping.
Hanna gets Josef transferred off the rig, but when they put him in the ambulance, she leaves him, returning to her home and job and routine while Josef heals.
Given her bag after checking out, he follows the letters in the bag to counselor Inge (Julie Christie), who tells him more and warns him away from Hanna. She offers him a chance to know more about her horrors, but he refuses. Instead he finds Hanna and asks if they can go away together.
She tells him she fears that if they did, someday, she would cry and cry and not be able to stop. That her tears would fill the room and drown them both.
"I'll learn to swim," he tells her. "I swear."
Our last look is at Hanna in a house, sitting alone and listening for her children to return from outside, mirroring the suggestion Josef made during their first meeting.
The Picture
Shown in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, The Secret Life of Words is a sparse and beautiful film. The transfer is clean, though the colors are muted, more as a servant of the script than in any failing of the technology. Only once did I see a problem with a delay between scene changes, it lasted just a second and didn't detract from the experience.
The Sound
The 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround sound is fine, really coming through in the scenes when the waves roll heavily against the legs of the oil rig. Polley speaks with an accent that isn't hard to understand, but if needed, subtitles are available.
The Extras
Here's a short story about that: No. There aren't any extras. The scene selection module is spare. There are no audio commentary tracks and no featurettes, which is a shame. I would very much have liked to know more about the source material and some historical background for reference.
The Case
The case is an unspectacular plastic case with two snaps on the side. A small booklet is included inside, but it's shilling for HD DVD and has nothing to do with the movie.
In Other Words...
I have rarely seen a better film than The Secret Life of Words. It is earnest without being sappy in the least, the storytelling is spare and riveting, with small actions paying great dividends as the film continues. There is humor, but always with the underlying question of what happened and why are these characters so damaged.
If this was just a movie review, I'd put it in the hall of fame, but as a DVD review, this has problems. The good-looking movie is accompanied by no extras at all, which means it gets just a Recommended rating. Watch this, however you can see it, but let's wait until a better version of the DVD - perhaps with bonus materials or a commentary - comes along.
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