Well, it’s wonderful that The Sea Inside (which opens Friday, Feb. 4, at the Meridian) is a best foreign-film nominee at the Oscars; its magnificent cast and its multifaceted director/composer/editor/co-writer Alejandro Amenábar deserve nothing less. As always, though, with the Academy, there’s a little bad for every good: With a straight face, the selection committee also tossed The Chorus, that mucilaginous bit of upbeat, in among the five nominees. Meanwhile over on the acting side, Javier Bardem, the beating heart of The Sea Inside, was crowded out. (Some think to make room for Clint Eastwood’s squinting stoicism. Don’t get me started.)
The sheen of sentimentality is conspicuously absent from Amenábar’s glorious film; in its place is the lyrical power of dreams and memory, cornerstone of at least two of his three earlier films, The Others, with Nicole Kidman, and Open Your Eyes (later mangled into Vanilla Sky). Since Amenábar’s very real subject, the Galician Ramón Sampedro, was a poet and writer, it seems a natural blend.
A sailor who’d been around the world by the time he was 19, Sampedro was paralyzed from the neck down in a diving accident in his late 20s. He became famous throughout Spain for his tireless, 30-year legal campaign to be allowed to die on his own terms. The title of his collected writings, Letters From Hell, gives a pretty clear idea of what he considered his life to have become.
Every actor should have to study how Bardem has focused his enormous physicality down to just his eyes, his voice (which he uses in the short, concentrated spurts of someone who has difficulty breathing), and an almost otherworldly concentration. With just those tools, he gives us the man in full: magnetically attractive but with withering scorn for sexual charity; intelligent, with a nice dry wit; and with enormous reserves of patience. That said, he is as far from a plaster saint as you could hope for.
One of Sea‘s recurring images is our first signal of its fantastic erotic rush. After Sampedro’s condition has become a given (and we’ve almost adjusted to Bardem, changed imperceptibly but irrefutably into a 55-year-old), we share one of his moments of blissful liberation. Alone in bed, with the sublime “Nessun Dorma” on his record player, his hands uncurl, then his sturdy bare feet hit the floor before he begins to fly out through the window and over the scrub of the rocky Galician countryside to the sea. (Only the camera flies, and his imagination.) After this literal out-of-the-body experience, we feel Sampedro’s tenacious anxiety to quit his husk of a body.
Amenábar expends an equal amount of imagination on the characters involved in Sampedro’s wish to die. First among them is the complex, married Julia (glowing newcomer Belén Rueda), a lawyer allied with the Death With Dignity cause, whom he has chosen because she herself has a life-threatening disease. Next is Rosa (Lola Dueñas), a warm, mouthy local factory worker with two young sons, no husband, and an overpowering desire to persuade Sampedro that life is worth living. (Dueñas was an equally vibrant presence as the nurse in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her.) In vastly different ways, both women are drawn by his compelling, virile presence. His friendship with Rosa has to survive his initial, withering summation of her as “a frustrated woman who just wants to give her life some meaning.”
Counterpart to these are Sampedro’s own solid family: his older brother, José, who will permit no talk of suicide in his house; José’s magnificent wife, Manuela (Mabel Rivera), Sampedro’s loving caregiver; and their dreamy son, Javi, who adores his uncle and keeps his computer running so that Sampedro can write with a mouth- held stick.
Amenábar gives every possible argument against suicide an impassioned voice. One of the funniest of these is Sampedro’s duel with a wheelchair-bound Jesuit, who gets out-argued when he travels down to the little rural farmhouse to talk Sampedro out of his sinful decision. The padre’s chair won’t fit on the staircase, and Sampedro can’t come down, so this ecclesiastical argument is carried on at full shout.
What the movie makes abundantly clear is that this is a unique, deeply felt case, not a cause. But by its agonizing final minutes (modeled on the videotape that Sampedro himself made in 1998), it is the film’s power that we understand that the person at his side is there in the purest act of love. It’s only in the poignant coda that follows that Amenábar lets his own hand show.
