A touching story of a deaf girl who is sent to an oil rig to take care of a man who has been blinded in a terrible accident. The girl has a special ability to communicate with the men on board and especially with her patient as they share intimate moments together that will change their lives forever.
16 Feb The Secret Life of Words (2005)
Blind Spots, Clarity
This is what Cassavedes thinks of as simple and direct theatre, a pipeline to emotions.
The idea is to simplify, presumably to purify. We have a remote oil rig with two full characters and a handful of surrounding beings. Our man (played by Tim Robbins) is temporarily blind, burned literally and figuratively: he was burned unsuccessfully trying to save a man he cuckolded from committing suicide. He is nursed by a character played by Sarah Polley, who has a tortured past.
She knows how to work with the purpose of a film, and when that purpose it to turn things over to the actors, she really turns it on. This actually works as intended for the first two thirds, where the narrative doesn’t exist and we just settle between these two. The situations and container are extreme, but we tie into the universal emotions that are raised here.
Unfortunately, towards the end, narrative takes over and we leave the world of connected emotions and enter the world of a story that must find its end. He, now sighted tracks her down, and appeals to a future in love regardless of the certain pain. This may make for a happy, even acceptable ending, but it is not the experience we invested in.
As if to assert that story trumps connectedness, the filmmaker goes the extraordinary distance to tell us how the story ends for every single character we met on that oil rig. Sometimes the filmmaker doesn’t have a clue.
Posted in 2011
Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
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