In The Secret Life of Words, a deaf factory worker spends her vacation caring for a burn victim on an oil rig in the middle of the sea. Sarah Polley (terrific as a bus-crash survivor in The Sweet Hereafter and as a zombie killer in Dawn of the Dead) plays the caretaker, who reveals little to her blind patient, played by a bedridden Tim Robbins. As their relationship warms, bits of their troubled pasts surface. It’s a sympathetic portrait of two broken people.
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This article appears in Apr 4-10, 2007.