"The Sea Inside"

"The Sea Inside" isn't simple-minded like Marsha Norman's vile play "'night, Mother," in which a woman about to kill herself spends the last hour and a half of her life torturing her mother with advance knowledge of what she plans. Amenébar doesn't shortchange the feelings of the people who'll survive Ramón. The actors in supporting roles are such a varied and vivid presence that they make us question Ramón's determination to die at every step. In addition to the trio of actors who play his family, there's Belén Rueda, wonderful as Julia, the lawyer who agrees to represent Ramón in his campaign to win the right to die. Rueda is one of those actresses whose radiance is tinged with a touch of the haggard. Julia is suffering from a degenerative disease that makes a series of increasingly debilitating strokes inevitable.

And it's another sign of Amenábar's willingness to make his drama unresolvable that we're not sure what to think when Julia announces that she wants to follow in Ramón's footsteps. She seems to be acting as much out of a romantic impulse as out of a rational decision to escape her inevitable physical deterioration. Rueda gets both Julia's courage and the irrationality of a romantic, utopian streak. As Gené, a right-to-die advocate who befriends Ramón, Clara Segura has an uncomplicated warmth. Lola Dueñas plays Rosa, a woman who goes to meet Ramón after seeing him on television. Rosa is one of those needy egomaniacs who find a way to trump everyone's misery with their own sack of woe. Maybe I've known too many people like Rosa or maybe Dueñas is too convincing. Whatever it is, she's so believable she drove me crazy.

Even when a potentially mawkish movie like this one is made with intelligence that escapes clichés and platitudes, it has to have a charismatic presence at the center to work. Amenábar is lucky that in Javier Bardem he has not just one of the greatest film actors now working but also one of the most physically beautiful. That's not to slight Amenábar. A ghost story like "The Others" and a film like "The Sea Inside" might not seem to share much. But both benefit from a type of restraint (the refusal to go for easy scares in the former, or for easy tears in the latter) that marks a director of real taste.

And real sensibility, too. Amenábar composed the score for "The Sea Inside," which is, of all things, Irish in flavor, loaded with the mournful and celebratory sound of uilleann pipes. That seems fitting. There's a combination of fatalism and hard-edged humor at work in "The Sea Inside" that you can imagine Irish writers would feel right at home with. When Bardem lets a wry smile cross his face, we feel as if we've seen the shrug that should accompany it. And though, in a dream sequence, Ramón flies (we don't see it, we watch from his point of view as the land moves by beneath him), all the suppressed longing in Bardem's performance makes you feel you've been looking at a man who at every moment is ready to soar.

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