"The Sea Inside"

If "The Sea Inside" were a typical entry in this genre, it would be set up to show that despair has gotten the better of Ramón, to show how he finds his inner strength and realizes life is worth living after all. That position is represented by a meddling priest (are there any other kind?), also quadriplegic, who turns up at Ramón's convinced that only someone unfulfilled, without love, could want to end his life. It's an arrogant assumption. Ramón has the benefit of living with an older brother so devoted that he quit his fishing business and became a farmer to be able to better care for Ramón. His sister-in-law, Manuela (the marvelous Mabel Rivera, who has some of the earthiness that was always a joy to behold in actresses like Anna Magnani and Margarita Lozano), tends lovingly to him (at one point, she says she has always thought of him as a son), and Ramón's nephew (Tamar Novas) is a talented boy who Ramón goads and encourages in his studies.

That family gives Ramón more love and support than many people who aren't handicapped have. But the movie stands with Ramón in his insistence that he should be allowed to end his life. And that's what makes the film so singular, because in taking Ramón's side Amenábar quietly and firmly contradicts all that we've unthinkingly come to parrot about the handicapped.

No one wants to go back to the time when the handicapped were treated as if their physical helplessness made them like children. But acknowledging what the handicapped are not capable of has become tantamount to an insult. Ramón is merely stating the obvious -- that a severely limited life is, of course, less fulfilling, more frustrating, potentially less dignified, than the lives lived by those who have the full use of their limbs. He's rejecting all the feel-good, well-intentioned malarkey doctors and social workers and advocacy groups routinely claim for the "useful" life the handicapped can lead. (Is there a more insulting word to apply to the concept of life than useful?) Ramón's insistence on speaking only for himself, and not as part of the handicapped, is, in a contemporary context, extremely politically incorrect. And it's because of Amenábar's ability to make fine moral delineations that his hero's individuality, the very thing that makes Ramón so admirable, also makes him, at times, a bit of a monster.

Because he is dependent, Ramón, in effect, needs someone to kill him. He devises a scheme that will save anyone who agrees to help him from facing prosecution. But apart from a moment when Ramón tells his brother, who absolutely forbids any suicide from being carried out in his house, that he doesn't want to be a burden to his sister-in-law and nephew should she be widowed, Ramón stays almost myopically focused on the legal issues when it comes to involving other people in his suicide. Ramón is not innocent of the selfishness of suicide; not only does he expect the people he leaves behind to bear the loss, he expects them to effect the loss.

Next Page: The restraint that marks a director of real taste

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