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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The strapping Javier Bardem soars as a quadriplegic man on a quest to die with dignity.
Dec 17, 2004 | There's an element of perversity in casting Javier Bardem as a quadriplegic. Whether he uses it exuberantly (as he did in "Before Night Falls") or holds it in reserve (as he did in "The Dancer Upstairs"), Bardem is defined by his strapping physicality. (He might seem nearly hulking if he weren't such a lyrical actor.) And he has the sort of regal profile that wouldn't be out of place on an ancient Roman coin.
Bardem spends almost all of his performance in Alejandro Amenábar's fine new film "The Sea Inside" ("Mar Adentro") in bed. He's playing the Galician Ramón Semprado, paralyzed from the neck down in a swimming accident as a young man, who badgered the Spanish government for 30 years to win the legal right to commit suicide. It's as if Bardem has chosen the role as an acting test, to see if he can retain his expressiveness while severely restricting his physical resources, and without bathing Ramón in the false saintly nobility that many actors in a part like this would seize on as a fast track to awards.
The film isn't in a league with "My Left Foot" or "The Elephant Man," the great movies about intelligence and spirit trapped in a body that threatens to extinguish them. (Part of that may be that the screenplay, by Amenábar and Mateo Gil, does not allow for the emotional, nearly operatic highs and lows of those pictures.) But like Daniel Day-Lewis and John Hurt in those movies, Bardem plays the man and not the handicap.
As Bardem essays Ramón's limited physical action, he makes you feel both the memory of movement and Ramón's desire to be able to force his will to overcome his crippled body. Bardem concentrates all of Ramón's passion, strength and intelligence in his large head, the only part of him that's mobile. His features are frequently in a grin, as if his situation has left him an observer able to savor the ironies everyone else misses.
"The Sea Inside"
Directed by Alejandro Amenabár
Starring Javier Bardem, Belén Rueda, Mabel Rivera, Celso Bugallo, Clara Segura, Tamar Novas
No recent movie's success was more surprising than Alejandro Amenábar's last picture, "The Others." A ghost story that operated entirely on mood and suggestion in the tradition of "The Haunting" and "The Innocents," it was exactly the sort of movie that no one expects to be a hit anymore.
"The Sea Inside" is another sort of surprise: exactly the sort of movie we don't expect from the triumph-over-adversity genre. That may be because, arguably, it isn't about a triumph. Ramón believes that his paralysis has stripped his life of dignity, not only because he needs to be fed, dressed and cleaned as an infant would but because he has no means to fulfill even the slightest of his desires: Forget even thinking about making love to the women he seems to attract without even trying -- Ramón can't so much as scratch his nose or turn the pages of a book without the help of a computer his nephew and elderly father have rigged up for him.
