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The Sea Inside Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG-13 (for intense depiction of mature thematic material) Theater release: September 03, 2004 by Fine Line Features Directed by: Alejandro AmenábarIn Spanish, with subtitles Runtime: 2 hours 5 minutes Cast: Javier Bardem (Ramón Sampedro), Belé;n Rueda (Julia), Lola Dueñas (Rosa), Mabel Rivera (Manuela), Celso Bugallo (José;) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

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If your mind is made up about euthanasia, you'll find The Sea Inside either galling or grand, depending which side you're on. Inspired by the real-life story of Ramón Sampedro, this film wants to appeal to our emotions, sweeping us up in an affection for its charismatic central character in hopes of making us side with him in his campaign to end his life in an assisted suicide.

But there's the problem. If you already disagree with the film's inescapable viewpoint, its one-sided polemic will mostly just aggravate you. If you haven't made up your mind, you may find it hard to feel what you're supposed to because your head keeps getting in the way—it'll get into your head more when it wants to win your heart. And if you happen to agree with its premise, you'll applaud its conclusion.

Unfortunately, The Sea Inside so resolved to make its point that it's unwilling to lend any credibility to any other side of the argument. If you're on the fence, you might find yourself constantly assessing (and ultimately reacting against) the film's arguments.

Ramon (Javier Bardem) and Julia (Belen Rudea) develop a mutual attraction

Still, The Sea Inside is admirable in many ways. Simply regarded as a film, it's memorable, closely observing the many details of life and human relationship that truly are worth noticing and celebrating. It's propaganda, sure, but it's not mere propaganda. There's real artistry here, and humanity. If only it weren't so issue-centered; we don't experience the film so much as we assess its arguments, and object to the high-handedness with which opposing viewpoints are dismissed.

The Sea Inside tells the story of a quadriplegic man who has been confined to his bed for three decades, following a diving accident. As unapologetically honest as he is about the reality of his situation, and as little patience as he has with ignorant strangers and their demands and presumptions, he's an intelligent and fundamentally pleasant man. We want to spend time with him. In spite of his condition, he's resolutely cheerful. And yet because of his condition, he wants to die.

Confined to his room, Sampedro (Javier Bardem) has no choice but to closely observe the physical realities of his immediate surroundings and the people in his life, eliciting a poet's appreciation for these everyday glories that is in constant tension with thwarted desire: He can see, smell, hear and imagine, but he cannot touch. He cannot engage, cannot enter in.

The film's great accomplishment is that it mostly confines itself to the man's immediate surroundings, forcing us to observe, to notice. In a sense the film makes us more alive by quickening our senses, bringing a deeper appreciation of a loving face, an act of kindness, the view from a window. Some of Sampedro's greatest pleasures are aural, and when he asks a friend to play a particular classical music selection, the camera takes great delight in observing the particularities of a vinyl record removed from its sleeve, placed on a turntable, the tone arm descending and the music coming. This quotidian delight is echoed when Rosa, a young single mother whose care-taking instincts have been rebuffed, dedicates a record to Ramon during her amateur radio show.

Beneath the ethical questions is a love story between Ramon and Julia

The Sea Inside isn't fundamentally preoccupied with story: it's about life experienced, and the agony of everyday sensual pleasures denied. What forward momentum there is builds around his efforts to gain legal permission or practical means to end his own life, and—even more—the progression of his relationships with two women; the smitten Rosa (played with verve and sparkle by Lola Dueñas) and the alluring lawyer Julia (the stunning and mature beauty Belén Rueda), with whom Ramon discovers an immediate and agonizing mutual attraction.

Apart from its emotional manipulation and rhetorical dishonesty, the film's main strategy—and by far its most successful, and aesthetically pleasing one—is its way of drawing us into empathy with the central character by forcing us to regard the same quotidian wonders Sampedro must look upon day after day. It shows us the glory of common things, the sensual delight of a swim in the ocean, an embrace or a bicycle ride, a growing sensitivity that serves only to emphasize Ramon's unbearable circumstances, where most of these glorious and common pleasures are out of reach if not out of sight. Following from this, we are expected to support his conclusion—that death is a reasonable exit from this unbearable tension.

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