PLOT: A dour, seemingly disturbed young woman interrupts her Irish holiday to nurse a burn victim while he recovers enough to be evacuated from an oil rig.
Isabel Coixet's new film, a grim human drama about two fractured human beings, is called The Secret Life Of Words.
It is the story of a European factory worker who, while on a holiday in Ireland, volunteers to temporarily nurse a burn victim. He is too fragile to be moved from the sick bay of an oil rig off the coast.
The through line in The Secret Life Of Words is one long if disjointed conversation between the two leads. She is reticent. He is poetic. Both are elusive.
The paradox embedded in the title of the film is that the two protagonists reveal as much, or more, in their pained silences as they do in their words.
Croixet, working here in English, gets subtly nuanced work from her stars to communicate the inner truths of the characters and the inner meaning of the film itself. Sarah Polley and Tim Robbins craft two interlocked, complementary performances that do the job. Their skill, their patience, their calm courage is the stuff of great cinema.
In this case, that was also necessary to overcome the film's structural limitations and an awkwardness in the storytelling. The oil rig is a dreary place for this to unfold.
Writer-director Coixet was obviously not that concerned with logic in mechanical story matters. Instead, she focused her energies, and those of her stars, on the logic of the human heart and mind. In this arena, The Secret Life Of Words is a sophisticated and powerful saga.
Both protagonists have been through horror. He reveals his circumstances more quickly than she. Her story is more crushing when it is more fully revealed.
But the most compelling part of the drama is the question of trust. Without it, there is no real communication. Without communication, there is nowhere to go in a relationship, even one as tenuous as nurse to patient.
Neither Polley nor Robbins -- and they make a surprisingly good match as a screen duo -- overplays a single breath or thought or word or silence.
Other key support players include Javier Camara as the rig's Spanish cook and Daniel Mays as a scientist who has been sent to monitor the effect of ocean waves on the rig structure, but is more concerned with the origins of a tropical species of mussel. That kind of colourful detail lets the viewer temporarily escape from the tyranny of the rig itself.
What you will not escape from -- and you shouldn't -- is the gravity of what this film explores. The Secret Life Of Words is a serious, heartfelt piece from a filmmaker concerned with human rights issues.
BOTTOM LINE: Blessed with astonishingly subtle performances from Sarah Polley and Tim Robbins, this grim human drama overcomes its awkward structure to become a testament to the resiliency of the human spirit.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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