Claudio Carvalho In Ireland, the introspective deaf worker Hanna (Sarah Polley) is forced to take vacations by her boss after four years service in a factory. She travels, but when she overhears a phone conversation in a restaurant, she offers to nurse a burned worker with fractures and temporarily blind in a decommissioned oil rig. Joseph (Tim Robbins) seriously wounded after risking his life to rescue a colleague that committed suicide jumping in a fire and need to stay for a while in the platform to stabilize his health condition. Hanna is a lonely woman, with the paranoid behavior of eating white rice, chicken nuggets and apple everyday and never repeating the soap, and she slowly interacts with the few workers first, opening her heart to Joseph later and disclosing her traumatic experience in her old country."The Secret Life of Words" is a touching and heartbreaking romance, with an awesome screenplay and wonderful performances of Sarah Polley and Tim Robbins. The dramatic story develops perfectly the characters and in spite of the happy-end, it is never corny. The sensitive direction of Isabel Coixet, from the stunning "My Life Without Me" with the same Sarah Polley, is top-notch again. The process of re-socialization of Hanna, who was dead inside and reborn after meeting Joseph, is intense. My vote is eight.Title (Brazil): "A Vida Secreta das Palavras" ("The Secret Life of Words")

januce7 Isabel Coixet undoubtedly possesses a tricky sense of humor (especially lines of the leading actor) and a delicate and sensitive imagination. The dialogs are prepared so smartly and the scenes are acted so lively that it was impossible to watch the movie from the "other side". the brilliant director immediately attracts you in.there are unanswered questions left so that you can make up the answers and participate in the film yourself.the synopsis is interesting and displays the lives or jobs of people far away from our sights and make the audience try to make empathy.it is like knowing that farmers exist somewhere but never ever thinking of what would it be like...to be a farmer...Moreover the film touches pathetic social issues in a very affective way without exaggerating and agitating.The only problem was dubbing...In short it is a film to see...a complete success

TxMike I've always enjoyed Sarah Polley, she has a certain "look" that makes her characters real. Here we first see her as a hearing-impaired factory line worker, Hanna, who works hard, doesn't say much to anyone else, and eats alone in the cafeteria. She has a foreign accent but we can't quite place it. After 4 years of constant work, she essentially is forced to go on holiday. She travels to a coastal town, where while eating overhears a phone conversation, an injured man needs a nurse for two weeks. She walks up, and without expression says, "I am a nurse. I can take care of him." In opening credits we see glimpses in slow motion of a fire and Tim Robbins as oil platform worker Josef is injured while trying in vain to save another. There is a connection between the men, quite complicated. But Joseph is the one who needs care and, being blinded for a couple of weeks, cannot see this nurse Hanna. She doesn't even tell him her name, so he ends up calling her Cora.While there are a few other men on the platform in the North Sea while the owners decide whether to continue production, most of the interest comes from the conversations between Hanna and Joseph. Polley and Robbins are both superb, and this thinking person's movie is a fine one to watch, then to ponder for a few days. No one has quite ever figured it all out! SPOILERS FOLLOW. Who remembers the Balkan War? As we finally see, Hanna and her friend went back home, only to eventually be held by UN Peacekeeping troops. They were not treated well, raped, some killed, when she finally survived the tragedy had a lasting affect on her. The outgoing, laughing girl became cautious and withdrawn. In the beginning of the movie, and again at the end, we hear the voice of a child, and we don't quite know if that is an inner voice of Hanna before her experience, or perhaps an aborted daughter she never saw. However in the end she and Joseph met up and nurtured the bond they developed while she cared for him.

marc4ucb-1 Sophie's Choice meets the English Patient w/ a Hollywood endingThe acting and dialog in this movie are first rate. But is there a "there there"? Hanna is the emotionally damaged survivor of War atrocity. She avoids any emotional and social life working only for survival in a Scottish factory. When her employer forces her to take a vacation she is forced to think about more than survival. At the last second she tries to avoid leisure time and the possibility of introspection and resurfacing emotion by volunteering to nurse for badly burned oil rig worker, Josef (Tim Robbins). Isolated on the Oil Rig with a skeleton crew she is touched by the guilt ridden and emotionally extroverted Josef. In return she confesses her own horrors. Having exposed herself she escapes from this impromptu group therapy and returns to her previous work life. Josef tracks her down with the help of Hanna's psychiatrist, Inge (Julie Christie). Julie Christie is excellent in this cameo role. Inga violates the most basic ethics of her profession to help Josef find Hanna. Hanna attempts to reject Josef because she is afraid her emotional problems will overwhelm them both. Based only on Josef's assertion that he will learn to deal with her emotional problems she relents, embrace, kiss fade out. I love the way this film is made. I love the acting. I love the dialog. In the end the resolution does not hold up. It isn't that the plot is improbable, it is simply that there is no explanation of how the events lead to the resolution.