The Sea Inside
In Spain, Ramón Sampedro was the national hero of a real-life saga about the right to die. The bedridden, quadriplegic former ship's mechanic, embodied with exquisite care by Javier Bardem in The Sea Inside, tussled with the courts, the church, and his own family for nearly 30 years before getting his wish to end his own life in 1998. (He had the event filmed and it was broadcast on Spanish TV.) Yet while he lived, Sampedro wrote poetry and a best-selling memoir, gave interviews, and charmed those around him — particularly women, who were prone to loving him — through the power of his personality.
All this is conveyed in Alejandro Amenábar's velvety Spanish biopic. The classy production, with its aesthetic graces, is especially convincing about the charisma of the man, a performance specialty of the great Bardem, who ages believably to a slack-muscled 55, and seduces believably, too (first Belén Rueda as his empathetic lawyer, then Lola Dueñas as a local woman who hopes to persuade her neighbor to live). But for non-Spaniards with less attachment to the case, and perhaps especially for Americans with so many Right To (fill in the blank) causes to choose from, the artistic velvet turns out to clog the emotional heart of the movie. Amenábar (the inventive Spaniard who made The Others) promotes dignity, love, and inspiration with such insistence that there's relatively little chance to feel Ramón Sampedro's unendurable pain.
