The Sea Inside

Buy This Item The Sea Inside by New Line Home Video  Available from Amazon  $21.99  on 11-25-2008     Academy Award nominee Javier Bardem (Before Night Falls) delivers a powerful and sensitive portrayal of a quadriplegic who fights to win the right to end his life with dignity. Based on a true story. <P><b>DVD Features:</b><b>Audio Commentary:</b>Director Commentary<b>Deleted Scenes:</b><b>Documentaries:</b>"A trip to The Sea Inside" Making-of<b>Storyboards:</b><b>Theatrical Trailer:</b></p> Reader Reviews The Sea Inside (Alejandro Amenabar, 2004) When you know how the story ends, and you still can't believe the director is going to end up there, that's a sign of one of two things-- either the director has the message chip on his shoulder in a big way, or the director is very, very good at what he does. I suspect, where The Sea Inside is concerned, there's some of both going on here. Amenabar (The Others) gives us the (true) story of Ramon Sampedro (Javier Bardem, Spain's greatest export), injured in a diving accident twenty-five years before and paralyzed from the neck down since, who wants only one thing: the right to end his own life without anyone getting arrested for it. Arrayed against him are, well, all the usual suspects: his family, the church, the government. Added to this is a new friend of his, a disc jockey named Rosa (Volver's Lola Duenas) who saw him on TV and has added her voice to the chorus against him. As Ramon and Rosa get to know each other better, his longtime lawyer Julia (The Orphanage's Belen Rueda) starts getting jealous. It's impossible to discuss the implications of this movie in detail without spoilers; I'll try to avoid them by saying it seemed to me that, perhaps, Amenabar himself was less than satisfied with the way the case actually turned out, and leave it at that (any examples would constitute spoilers). This cast something of a pall over the movie for me, despite all the many things going in its favor. Javier Bardem is, of course, an incredible actor, and just about anything he does is well worth your time. The interactions between Bardem, Duenas, and Rueda, in their various combinations, are fascinating, and if much of the rest of the film had been trimmed away, they would still make for an excellent piece of cinema. Not that I mean to imply, though I guess I have, that the love-triangle aspect of the movie is of any prominence (or, for that matter, much importance) in the greater scheme of things; it's a grace note at best in the midst of a symphony. But this is, perhaps, why I have been letting this film simmer in my head for almost a month without writing a review of it until now; so many of the things about which I wanted to see more were in the background, while my original reason for wanting to see the film (which, for once, wasn't Javier Bardem; I consider Ramon Sampedro a hero, despite the ultimate futility of his crusade), which did take center stage, seemed to pale in comparison. A good film, but a tough one to rate. It's one of those rare movies that manages to be very good and yet still show plainly that it could have been so much more. *** ½

The Sea Inside Available from Amazon Price: $21.99 Updated on 11-25-2008.

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