Warning: This review contains spoilers.
"Mar Adentro" / "Sea Inside" contains some beautiful moments, and the cast is terrific, but the film, which wants to talk about big, deep issues, is frustratingly shallow over all. It's almost as if the director and screenwriter are afraid of getting in too deep, over their heads.
The beautiful moments: Ramon Sampedro (Javier Bardem) tells his nephew Javi (Tamar Novas) that some day he will deeply regret making disparaging comments about his feeble grandfather.
Ramon, a bedridden quadriplegic, imagines himself airborne, able to fly over the sere and steep countryside to the sea. "Nessun Dorma" plays as he flies.
A young man, suddenly stricken by sentiment, runs after a van retreating from him. An old man ponders the belongings of his departed son.
The cast is utterly wonderful. The actors have a substance and reality to them that seems beyond American film actors today. They seem *real.* Lola Duenas, as Rosa, an emotionally immature, working class woman; Mabel Rivera, as Manuela, Ramon's sister-in-law, who gives her life to Ramon's care; and Ramon's brother and grandfather, are so real that when they are on screen, you feel as if you are watching a documentary, and these are the real people involved in the dramatized events.
Javier Bardem, one of the greatest actors working today, is flawless as Sampedro, a character I grew to thoroughly dislike. A brave performance.
Of course, Ramon Sampedro was a real Spanish quadriplegic who worked for the legal right to have help in ending his own life.
So far so good.
But the film, ultimately, is shallow. It shies away from any serious exploration of the deeper issues of the euthanasia of quadriplegics.
I worked with the dying for many years, and, later, I was stricken by a paralyzing and torturous illness, and have had much opportunity to explore the question of euthanasia and suicide from many angles.
In the film, Sampedro insists that he is making a decision for himself alone, and that his decision has no import to anyone else. "I'm not talking about quadriplegics; I'm talking about Ramon Sampedro," he says.
That's balderdash, and, more importantly, no one in the film is allowed to disagree with him. In spite of the excellent cast, this is Ramon's show, from start to finish. Just as, as depicted in the film, everyone dances around Ramon, the movie's intellectual point revolves, relentlessly, around him, without ever breaking free of his loud and egotistical orbit.
Sampedro proves his own argument false. He poses, naked, for television cameras, so that people can see how, in his estimation, pathetic the body of a quadriplegic is. He commits suicide *on camera.* He takes his case to court, though we all know that euthanasia goes on everyday, in quiet agreements between doctors, patients, and families.
So, so much for the idea that this is all just about one man.
In any case, no man is an island, and a very public statement that one quadriplegic finds his own situation so unworthy as to be something that must be escaped from at any cost is going to have an impact on other quadriplegics' lives. It is a fact that within the memory of people alive today, it was government policy in the most powerful nation in Europe to destroy "life unworthy of life," and any movie that announces itself as addressing this issue has got to take that on.
"Sea Inside" does not. Rather, it uses an unattractive quadriplegic priest to serve as Sampedro's punching bag. Sampedro shouts the priest down with infantile comments like, "You'd like to burn me at the stake!" I mean, come on. This childish, Christophobic nonsense is the best intellectual answer the film can offer to the position that even paralyzed people's lives are worthy? Ironically, Sampedro never admits that his life is richer and more blessed than many others. People love him. He has family. He is a published poet. He's a national celebrity activist, rewriting the law. Women fall all over him. Poor Ramon! Look -- I know what it's like to be imprisoned in flesh that won't obey. I respect what Sampedro went through, and I don't have the answer to the ethics or morality around suicide / euthanasia, but I know that this film not only didn't supply the answer, it didn't even explore the question.
The seal of the film's cheap, one-sided approach comes in the film's final scene. Sampedro had had an affair with Julia (Belen Rueda), a married lawyer who suffering from a degenerative disease.
Julia agrees to kill herself with Sampedro. This promise gives him the first hope he's had so far in the film. Julia then abandons Sampedro, not even having the decency to blow him off in person, but by sending him a note.
Sampedro is crushed, sobbing in the night, to be nursed by Manuela. We feel great sympathy for what is otherwise an arrogant man.
After Sampedro dies, in a gratuitous scene, Julia is shown to be a ravaged, simple-minded shell of her former self. She can't even remember who "Ramon" was. Gene (Clara Segura), her fellow euthanasia activist who comes to visit her, looks at Julia as if she has two heads. It's a very cheap and nasty piece of acting. "Ew!" Segura seems to be saying. "This is what happens when you let yourself go to pot, rather than killing yourself when you are young, beautiful and fit!" It's a cinematic sentiment worthy of Leni Riefenstahl.
"Mar Adentro" / "Sea Inside" contains some beautiful moments, and the cast is terrific, but the film, which wants to talk about big, deep issues, is frustratingly shallow over all. It's almost as if the director and screenwriter are afraid of getting in too deep, over their heads.
The beautiful moments: Ramon Sampedro (Javier Bardem) tells his nephew Javi (Tamar Novas) that some day he will deeply regret making disparaging comments about his feeble grandfather.
Ramon, a bedridden quadriplegic, imagines himself airborne, able to fly over the sere and steep countryside to the sea. "Nessun Dorma" plays as he flies.
A young man, suddenly stricken by sentiment, runs after a van retreating from him. An old man ponders the belongings of his departed son.
The cast is utterly wonderful. The actors have a substance and reality to them that seems beyond American film actors today. They seem *real.* Lola Duenas, as Rosa, an emotionally immature, working class woman; Mabel Rivera, as Manuela, Ramon's sister-in-law, who gives her life to Ramon's care; and Ramon's brother and grandfather, are so real that when they are on screen, you feel as if you are watching a documentary, and these are the real people involved in the dramatized events.
Javier Bardem, one of the greatest actors working today, is flawless as Sampedro, a character I grew to thoroughly dislike. A brave performance.
Of course, Ramon Sampedro was a real Spanish quadriplegic who worked for the legal right to have help in ending his own life.
So far so good.
But the film, ultimately, is shallow. It shies away from any serious exploration of the deeper issues of the euthanasia of quadriplegics.
I worked with the dying for many years, and, later, I was stricken by a paralyzing and torturous illness, and have had much opportunity to explore the question of euthanasia and suicide from many angles.
In the film, Sampedro insists that he is making a decision for himself alone, and that his decision has no import to anyone else. "I'm not talking about quadriplegics; I'm talking about Ramon Sampedro," he says.
That's balderdash, and, more importantly, no one in the film is allowed to disagree with him. In spite of the excellent cast, this is Ramon's show, from start to finish. Just as, as depicted in the film, everyone dances around Ramon, the movie's intellectual point revolves, relentlessly, around him, without ever breaking free of his loud and egotistical orbit.
Sampedro proves his own argument false. He poses, naked, for television cameras, so that people can see how, in his estimation, pathetic the body of a quadriplegic is. He commits suicide *on camera.* He takes his case to court, though we all know that euthanasia goes on everyday, in quiet agreements between doctors, patients, and families.
So, so much for the idea that this is all just about one man.
In any case, no man is an island, and a very public statement that one quadriplegic finds his own situation so unworthy as to be something that must be escaped from at any cost is going to have an impact on other quadriplegics' lives. It is a fact that within the memory of people alive today, it was government policy in the most powerful nation in Europe to destroy "life unworthy of life," and any movie that announces itself as addressing this issue has got to take that on.
"Sea Inside" does not. Rather, it uses an unattractive quadriplegic priest to serve as Sampedro's punching bag. Sampedro shouts the priest down with infantile comments like, "You'd like to burn me at the stake!" I mean, come on. This childish, Christophobic nonsense is the best intellectual answer the film can offer to the position that even paralyzed people's lives are worthy? Ironically, Sampedro never admits that his life is richer and more blessed than many others. People love him. He has family. He is a published poet. He's a national celebrity activist, rewriting the law. Women fall all over him. Poor Ramon! Look -- I know what it's like to be imprisoned in flesh that won't obey. I respect what Sampedro went through, and I don't have the answer to the ethics or morality around suicide / euthanasia, but I know that this film not only didn't supply the answer, it didn't even explore the question.
The seal of the film's cheap, one-sided approach comes in the film's final scene. Sampedro had had an affair with Julia (Belen Rueda), a married lawyer who suffering from a degenerative disease.
Julia agrees to kill herself with Sampedro. This promise gives him the first hope he's had so far in the film. Julia then abandons Sampedro, not even having the decency to blow him off in person, but by sending him a note.
Sampedro is crushed, sobbing in the night, to be nursed by Manuela. We feel great sympathy for what is otherwise an arrogant man.
After Sampedro dies, in a gratuitous scene, Julia is shown to be a ravaged, simple-minded shell of her former self. She can't even remember who "Ramon" was. Gene (Clara Segura), her fellow euthanasia activist who comes to visit her, looks at Julia as if she has two heads. It's a very cheap and nasty piece of acting. "Ew!" Segura seems to be saying. "This is what happens when you let yourself go to pot, rather than killing yourself when you are young, beautiful and fit!" It's a cinematic sentiment worthy of Leni Riefenstahl.