Check Out the Trailer

For some reason it took some time for me to get around to seeing the 2004 Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film. It’s funny that I’d see this film a day after watching LEAVING LAS VEGAS for the films have a lot of similarities. The central characters want to die. Their loved one(s) don’t want them to die, but the central characters are adamant and do not want to be persuaded differently.

THE SEA INSIDE tells the true-life story of Spaniard Ramon Sampedro (Javier Bardem, BEFORE NIGHT FALLS), who at the age of 20 became a paraplegic who could not move any of his limbs. For 28 years, he has been cared for by his brother’s wife Manuela (Mabel Rivera) and later with the help of her son Javier (Tamar Novas). Ramon is part of an euthanasia organization fighting for his right to die. Taking his case is lawyer Julia (Belén Rueda), who is suffering from a disease that afflicts her with frequent heart attacks and will one day leave her a vegetable.

The people in Ramon’s life take varying views on his desire to kill himself. Manuela begrudgingly respects Ramon’s wishes. His father Joaquin (Joan Dalmau, 2002’s GLORIA) is saddened by his son’s choice. His brother Jose (Celso Bugallo) vehemently forbids the idea. Later a young lonely woman named Rosa (Lola Dueñas, TALK TO HER) wants to persuade him to live and in the process falls in love with him. Even Gene (Clara Segura), the leader of the euthanasia organization, questions the choice to die from time to time.

Through Ramon the film doesn’t hold euthanasia up as an answer for all ill or impaired people, but as the choice that Ramon wants for himself. The film does a good job of showing us why Ramon feels the way he does and in turn debates the meaning of life. For Ramon not being able to immerse himself in all that living provides is not a life with dignity.

Many of the characters in the film do not agree with Ramon’s assessment, but the film makes a solid argument for an individual’s right to choose his own destiny whether we agree with it or not. The film is wonderful in how it embraces all sides of the issue. It never made me agree with Ramon, but for an able-bodied person maybe I just can’t understand fully. The film is tragic in some ways, but consoling in others. As Ramon says — life is a right, but shouldn’t be an obligation.