Arts
Though it was made by a director, Alejandro Amenábar, who's known mostly for atmospheric big-twist thrillers, the Spanish foreign-language Oscar nominee The Sea Inside is an earnest fact-based drama about the right to control one's own destiny. But it draws its power from a largely taboo fear: that of an active mind imprisoned in an immobile body. As Ramon Sampedro, the quadriplegic activist who fought the Spanish courts for three decades insisting upon his right to die, the strapping actor Javier Bardem spends all but a few scenes motionless in bed. Paralyzed in a diving accident, Sampedro was unable to move anything but his head; it's a testament to human resourcefulness that Bardem expresses so many emotional nuances—scorn, wounding memory, even an elegiac lust that serves as a kind of sensualist hell—through such limited body language.
Sadly, The Sea Inside is itself severely limited, both by the docudrama form and by its stubborn determination to uplift. Co-written by Amenábar and Mateo Gil, the movie is so oppressively tasteful, and so squeamish about the indignities that made Sampedro prefer death, that the central argument registers only in the abstract. Curiously, the more time the movie spends in Sampedro's warm company, the more selfish and misguided his suicide seems—the opposite effect intended by Amenábar's ham-fisted thesis statements. The terms of the drama are set up in the first scenes, and the movie never wavers from them: the supporting characters, including a lawyer (Belén Rueda) suffering from a debilitating illness and the single-mom factory worker (Lola Dueñas) who becomes Sampedro's companion, show up mostly to take sides.
The only figure who doesn't come off as a talking head is Sampedro, as much for Amenábar's sympathetic direction as for Bardem's performance. Amenábar and his splendid cinematographer, Javier Aguirresarobe, use room-scanning pans from Sampedro's restricted view as if the very existence of physical space were mocking him. When he escapes his bonds in dreams, the camera rushes toward his window and takes leap into flight—a corny idea that has almost transcendent force here. Only a movie could convey the tantalizing torment of movement so powerfully.
The right-to-die topic has made another Oscar nominee the target of vilification, and this one also to a lesser extent: both films assert a character's choice how to live and end his life, not because of some moral or intellectual stance but because of who that character is. (Another movie opening this weekend, Vera Drake—Mike Leigh's fine period drama about a dedicated 1950s abortionist—complicates the argument enormously.) That the reaction has been so intense only shows how deep the fear of bodily impairment runs, and how much we try to deny our own fragility.
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—Jim Ridley