[ThisWeek] The Sea Inside at the Kenworthy

[thisweek at kenworthy.org]

This week at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre-

The Sea Inside (PG-13)
Friday, May 6
7PM
Saturday & Sunday, May 7 & 8
4:15 / 7PM
$5 adults, $2 children 12 and under
KFS passes accepted for Sunday movies
(See Review below)
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Next week at the Kenworthy-

Lost Embrace (NR)
May 13 at 7PM
May 14 - 15 at 4:30 and 7PM
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Also in May at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre . . .

Eric Anderson
in concert
May 20 at 8:00 PM
Tickets $5 at Bookpeople

Rendezvous Music Showcase
May 21 at 7PM
$5 admission

Hard Goodbyes my Father (NR)
May 22 at 4:30 and 7PM

Million Dollar Baby (PG13)
May 27 at 7PM
May 28 - 29 at 4 and 7PM

Regular Movie prices:  $5 adults, $2 children 12 and younger.
KFS passes accepted for Sunday movies

Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre
508 S. Main Street, Moscow, Idaho
For more information, call 208-882-4127 or visit http://www.kenworthy.org
* * *
This week¹s review-

The Sea Inside

Directed by Alejandro Amenábar
Written by Mr. Amenábar and Mateo Gil

In Spanish, with English subtitles
Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes
Rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). The central issue addressed in
this film could make children (and even adults) uncomfortable.


As reviewed by Philip French writing for The Observer (UK)

The question 'whose life is it anyway?' is very much in the cinema and the
issue of euthanasia features in two films; Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar
Baby and Alejandro Amenábar's The Sea Inside (Mar Adentro).

The issue is not new, of course. A common event in fiction and dramatic
literature is that of a dying man asking to be put out of his misery. In
1935, at the height of the Depression in America, a novel and a play
appeared with similar climaxes. In Robert Sherwood's play ³The Petrified
Forest,² later filmed with Leslie Howard and Humphrey Bogart in their
original Broadway roles, a spiritually desiccated poet-philosopher asks a
gangster to kill him in order that a young woman to whom he has assigned his
life insurance can fulfill her dreams of studying in Paris.

In Horace McCoy's book, ³They Shoot Horses, Don't They?,² a young woman,
desperate and at the end of her emotional tether, asks a man to kill her.
This he does, explaining to the cops that he was only doing what humane
country folk do to farm animals that can no longer perform their proper
functions. 

As with Eastwood's ²Million Dollar Baby,² the decisions are rapidly taken,
but not the less serious for that, nor the less involving for the audience.
In Amenábar's film, the right to die with dignity and the duty of others to
either assist or prevent such an undertaking become the all-consuming
issues. 

The most surprising aspect of The Sea Inside is that its hero, Ramón
Sampredo (the handsome, expressive Javier Bardem), has been paralysed and on
his back for 27 years, since breaking his neck in his early twenties in a
diving accident. He has spent all this time being cared for by his father,
his older brother, sister-in-law and teenage nephew in a small farmhouse
near the coast of Galicia.

Clearly, the experience has brought this former merchant marine mechanic to
a point of reflective maturity where he would rather die than live. There is
nothing sudden about this decision, his mind is in better shape than ever,
but he is dependent on the kindness of others.

He deliberately chooses a lawyer, whose own degenerative disease makes her
sympathetic to his condition, though, along the way, she comes to take a
different view of his case. He also attracts through his television campaign
a young, unmarried working-class mother who believes her experience of
hardship might give him the will to live.

Ramón's wish to die is something of an affront to his family who think it
brings into question the power of their love and devotion, and this aspect
is exploited by a rigid Jesuit, himself a paraplegic. The film gently mocks
this cleric, especially in an amusing scene in which he comes to confront
Ramón but is forced to conduct a debate from his wheelchair downstairs,
communicating through an altar boy on the staircase with the bedridden Ramón
on the first floor.

This encounter is crucial, because central to the film's argument is that
the courts of a now secular Spain are making theological judgments. Actors
(and Academy Award voters) love this kind of role, and there is no doubt a
queue is forming to play the totally paralysed and speechless Jean-Dominique
Bauby in the film version of his beautiful memoir, The Diving-Bell and the
Butterfly that Ronald Harwood is currently adapting for the screen.

Nevertheless, Bardem, his charisma and striking good looks subdued by
make-up and immobility, gives a subtle and affecting performance. And
Amenábar, a director fascinated by the occult and the supernatural in
pictures such as ³Vanilla Sky² and ³The Others,² and given to startling
effects, here works in a subdued, attentive fashion. He only indulges his
penchant for the bravura in a couple of dream sequences where we are
admitted to Ramón's imaginative inner world.


As review by Carla Meyer writing for the San Francisco Chronicle

The Sea Inside'' tackles the issue of assisted suicide without being
didactic. Instead it's moving, romantic, dreamlike, flawlessly acted and so
engaging as to make you forget about euthanasia before it jolts you back
into recognition. 

Javier Bardem stars as Ramon Sampedro, the real-life quadriplegic who fought
for many years in Spanish courts for the right to end his life. To say
Bardem "plays'' Sampedro doesn't cut it. He centers the movie's universe as
his character holds forth from his bed in a plain Galician farmhouse,
stoking passion, anger, devotion, polemics and giggles from those who meet
him. 

Director Alejandro Amenabar ("The Others''), 32 years old and now officially
a major director, chose his approach as wisely as he did his leading man.
"The Sea Inside'' focuses on life, not death, and in doing so establishes
the sanctity of individual ownership of an existence. This awareness never
leaves, even when you wish the character would choose to keep living.

Lying in a pleasant bedroom with big windows looking out upon the
countryside (but not as far as the sea, where a diving accident paralyzed
him), Ramon listens to Wagner and holds a pen in his mouth to write poetry.
He seems more refined than the relatives who care for him, so it's a
surprise to find he was a ship's mechanic before his accident. The
appearance of refinement derives from inner peace, from having long ago come
to terms with the decision to end his life. Or rather, finish the job, since
Ramon believes he was meant to drown at the time of his accident.

"The Sea Inside'' flashes back to the moments after the accident to
underline his point. The young Ramon, also played by Bardem, floats in the
water, unconscious, before an arm encircles him and jerks him back to what
is supposed to be safety. The moment haunts in its implications of human
intrusion into what might have been a larger plan.

Ramon's ease within himself appeals to women, including lawyer Julia (Belen
Rueda), who helps him with his case as she battles a degenerative disease,
and Rosa (Lola Duenas), a factory worker and single mother who hears about
his story and visits him, hoping to change his mind about dying. Rueda, a
Spanish TV star making her film debut, and Duenas, the female nurse from
"Talk to Her,'' add great dimension to the story. Julia, elegant,
compassionate and sad around the eyes, contrasts with Rosa, who is
desperate, pushy and lovable. You can see why Ramon likes each of them.

Bardem and Rueda create real sparks, but Ramon dismisses the idea of romance
as ridiculous for a man in his condition. His daydreams tell a different
story, letting Ramon fly over trees and to the shore, where he spies Julia
walking along the sand. Suffused with warmth throughout by cinematographer
Javier Aguierresarobe, "The Sea Inside'' positively glows during this scene,
transporting the audience to the beach on a sunny day.

Julia and Ramon's meeting of souls seems full of possibility, even though he
wants to die and she is dying. Our expectations, as moviegoers and human
beings, are for this pairing to flower. Amenabar douses those assumptions.
Ramon might appear to have much to live for, from the outside looking in,
but only he knows the inside. He can tease and flirt and even have feelings
for a woman, but he never stops wanting to die, just as the twinkle never
leaves Bardem's expression when Ramon reiterates this wish.


As reviewed by Stephen Holden writing for the New York Times

As the camera restlessly circles the sky and the ocean, taking in the
radiance of northern Spain, ''The Sea Inside,'' the story of a quadriplegic
activist fighting for the right to die, struggles to transcend the
disease-of-the-week genre to which it belongs. Yet there is no escaping the
fact that the true story of Ramón Sampedro, a former ship's mechanic seeking
a final exit after three decades of agonizing immobility, is defined by its
theme. 

Sensitively portrayed by the great Spanish actor Javier Bardem, Ramón
regards his life in the wake of a crippling accident in his mid-20's as a
cruel, cosmic joke. In his imagination, he is still as he was before: a
Zorba-like force of nature who once sailed the world. Now the only thing
sustaining his spirit is his acute mind, which torments him with dreams of a
physical life that is just a memory.

In the film's most remarkable sequence, Ramón, bedridden in his family's
house in Galicia overlooking the sea, suddenly stirs, then lurches
unsteadily to his feet. For a second, you wonder if his condition all these
years has been an elaborate hoax, or if a miracle has occurred. As he steals
out of the house and flies to the beach to join his beautiful lawyer Julia
(Belén Rueda), the Puccini aria ''Nessun dorma,'' which he is playing on a
phonograph, swells over the soundtrack, and they fall into a rapturous
embrace. Then Ramón snaps to attention. It's only a fantasy that the
filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar has milked for its last drop of heartbreaking
impossibility. 

Mr. Amenábar, the gifted 32-year-old director of ''The Others'' and ''Open
Your Eyes'' (later remade as ''Vanilla Sky''), is clearly fixated on the
shadowy area between life, death and the spirit world. This time he forsakes
science fiction and ghost stories to put his spin on a famous case history.

On Jan. 12, 1998, the 55-year-old Sampedro ended his life by drinking
cyanide in an elaborately planned ritual that was videotaped and shown on
Spanish television. His assisted suicide involved 10 collaborators, in
addition to a cameraman. Each participant in the step-by-step process
contributed to the ritual without having enough knowledge of the process to
be legally indicted for murder. After his death, hundreds of supporters of
his cause wrote letters, confessing to having aided and abetted him.

''The Sea Inside'' presents a teasing paradox. Unambiguously pro-euthanasia
on one hand, it shows how Ramón, bedridden and unable to move, infused many
of those around him with a charged sense of life's possibility. Mr. Bardem
creates a complicated male character, volatile and witty, with a poet's
soul. 


Film reviews researched and edited by Peter Haggart

* * *
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PAMELA PALMER, Volunteer
Mailto:ppalmer at moscow.com
Film and Events Committee
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

http://www.kenworthy.org

To speak with a KPAC staff member,
call (208) 882-4127
Mailto:kpac at moscow.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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