Alejandro Amenábar
Mare Dentro

Ramon Sampedro is a man in his fifties, quadriplegic, who has been bedridden for almost 30 years due to an accident. His legs are deformed, his arms and hands are immobilized in an unnatural position, and he cannot move anything of his body except his neck and can speak. Speak for 125 minutes.

Javier Bardem is a good actor, with a big head, and capable of truly noteworthy expressions and acting virtuosity. Personally, I appreciated him greatly for his performance in the excellent "No Country for Old Men" by the Coen brothers, and here too, in his own way, he doesn't joke around. In short, Javier Bardem is a good one. But he is also someone who can be too much Javier Bardem, and too much Javier Bardem in the hands of a director without a sense of moderation, fundamentally lacking personality, and absolutely incapable of reining in voiceovers can turn into a ticking time bomb ready to explode inside a container filled with liquid excrement, shards of glass, and pentachlorophenol.

Ramon wishes to die and has wished so for years. A life forced to be spent in bed against one's own will and desires is not real life, because it cannot be lived. The message is clear and undeniable and more than shared. A life of immobilization cannot be called a life, despite imagination, despite dreams, and despite the implausibility. Therefore, Ramon is unwell, but he has too healthy a voice and reaction times to dialogue worthy of a printed book to properly interpret a quadriplegic. In "The Sea Inside," there are two of them, quadriplegics, (plus a third, the lawyer). And so we have a quadriplegic priest who visits him to dissuade him from wanting to die, only that both seem to be in excellent health and eventually appear very ready, agile, and seem almost better than the others. It’s no small matter, although this is really the least. Because at the end of the day, the priest's scene is perhaps one of the few where the film weakly manages to rise back from the undertow which from the very first lines it had deliberately sunk into.

A metaphorical filmic journey of Ramon's accident, breaking his neck on the sandy seabed after a thoughtless dive, yet retold identically in the form of a filmic-exoskeleton structure which, like the protagonist, deliberately dives into a shallow sandy seabed? Frankly, I don’t know, but I'm not inclined to believe that Amenabar could have had so much courage and lucidity to perform such a bold and particular maneuver and at the same time packaged such a mediocre product, so poor in style and content. But let's not get lost in fruitless discussions about a director's intentions (a crafty professional category capable of inventing out of thin air and retroactively the reasons for their choices, and turning crap into gold) and get back to us. Ramon lives with his family (the old father, confused, actually just silent, who is certainly the best character in the story [and not by chance will he pronounce the best line of the best scene of the film [the wonderful: "There is only one thing worse than a son who dies. A son who wants to die"], the dimwitted nephew, the ignorant older brother, the sister-in-law, and three or four rotating characters including two flames: the lawyer Julia and the simple-minded Rosa), in a modest country house surrounded by greenery and the affection of all who know him.

There is not much to spoil about the plot. It's a film about euthanasia, so it’s logical to expect how it will end. Far more legitimate, however, is to expect "how" (or "the way in which") a film of this type could be developed in all its crucial points, in all its meanings, purposes, and all its messages that are not easy and never trivial, and certainly should not be trivialized (neither simplifying nor overloading simple matters with meaning that should remain as they are). So let’s cut to the chase and say right away that the film is an abyssal crap. Voiceovers by the ton, shots and editing at the edge of captioning, a development of the narrative that seems to proceed parallel and on a separate dimension from what moves the characters and their actions (see the incipits to the scene of the poetry reading by Julia, the hasty ending [although in reality there would be at least three or four actual endings in the film, but initiating such a discussion here would require much mental elasticity, a bit of a willingness to waste time, and a good dose of sense of humor], the approximate characterization and borderline sketchiness of certain characters, as well as their development concerning the events of the Miniature and Macroscopic Maredentric cosmos [I think in this case of the duo Julia / Rosa and the improbable triangle Julia / Rosa / Ramon, complete with a "scolding" and a jealousy scene by the lawyer).

In short, things happen because they had to happen, the screenplay (which seems to have been written by a fourteen-year-old at the first year of classical high school) is from all perspectives oppressive, so much that the characters appear in all respects detached from the events they themselves (more unwillingly than voluntarily) go through, and they make happen but limit themselves to caressing the surface of things. There are nice moments in the film, this is undeniable, but it is limited to few and rare fractions of a second, and it is all nonetheless spoiled by the intrusions of a frankly cumbersome voiceover (I strongly advise, among other things, against watching the dreadful ending), by some poorly placed line, by some behavior absolutely inexplicable not so much because it is insignificant or unbelievable, but essentially and objectively gratuitous, such that it ends up seeming as if pasted onto a grotesque cardboard backdrop.

Film too pompous, too puffed up, and too awarded (Grand Jury Prize and Volpi Cup for Best Actor awarded to Javier Bardem at the 61st Venice International Film Festival 2004; 2005 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film; Oscar for Best Foreign Film; Oscar nomination for Best Makeup; 2005 David di Donatello for Best EU Film).

Short break. Frankly, and I say this with utmost sincerity, I find all this far too disheartening. Because the idea that a person, maybe passionate, maybe searching for a touching story "that makes you think" (especially on a subject as important as the freedom to be able to choose one's fate), might let themselves be deceived by a slapped-together and insufficient flick like "The Sea Inside," possibly missing out on the much more sober and substantial "The Barbarian Invasions" by Denys Arcand, really saddens me a great deal.