Review of The Sea Inside

I saw Mar Adentro (Out at Sea would be the better translation) last Sunday. The movie is powerful and moving, as was the true story of Ramón Sampedro, a quadriplegic from a coastal village in Galicia (Northwest Spain). Sampedro lived for 27 years lying in a bed, unable to move but his neck and face, needing help and attention with everyday needs, and fighting a battle to obtain legal permission for somebody to assist him in his suicide. A sensitive and articulate man, Sampedro wrote (with his mouth), gave television interviews, and captivated the Spanish public with his good humour, his wit, his intelligence, and his dramatic and well-reasoned determination to be able to control his life and death. The legal battle was -predictably- lost, but Sampedro died anyway. It is no small feat that this real-life story remains as poignant on screen as it was in reality. Amenábar has intelligently stayed close to the real characters and their surroundings. Beautiful landscapes, an outstanding score (most of it by Amenábar himself, played and arranged by Carlos Núñez). The cast is prodigious overall. Bardem's performance as Sampedro is superb, even in points such as the slight Galician accent, convincing and never overdone. Few actors have so dominated a movie despite the limitations inherent in playing a quadriplegic. Mabel Rivera outshines the rest of the supporting cast as Sampedro's unselfish, undemanding, loving sister-in-law. Belén Rueda gives a competent performance as Julia, one of Sampedro's pro bono lawyers who suffers from a degenerative disease herself and is considering euthanasia. But her character is a weak presence in the movie, and only makes sense towards the end, when her disease has deprived her of the ability to choose. Most troublesome is the unconvincing love story between Julia and Sampedro; this may have been an attempt -in my view failed and superfluous- to underline how seductive a character Sampedro was; Bardem should have been trusted on that without this superficial prop. The multiplicity of characters combined with the slow-pace, majestic rhythm of the movie, punctuated by flights over breathtaking landscapes and the repetition of the scene of Sampedro's accident, are at odds with how many layers of complexity Amenábar can show in the time of a movie. And this may be the source of one of its few weaknesses: we are left with a slightly manichean view of things. For example, the only two characters not supportive of Sampedro's decision to die are slightly -or grossly- caricatured; one of them -a quadriplegic priest- provides one of the intensely comic moments of the film. This, in turn, is one of the many merits of the movie: faithful to Sampedro's personality, there is humour, there is wit, there are moments to laugh (Sampedro asks Julia for a cigarette; she reminds him that he does not smoke; he replies: I know, but what if it kills me?"). This is not a depressing movie, but a movie about the irreductible freedom of the human being, about dignity, about love, about self-sacrifice. And about our bonds to our fellow humans, how we create them, how we nourish them, how we abuse them, and how we must realize, painful as it may be, that we have no rights over other people's lives. Films like Mar Adentro remind you what movie-making is (or should be) about.