You may want to call me crazy, but I’ve always told people that it is selfish to cry at a funeral. Maybe I am crazy, but listen to the reasoning. I feel that it is selfish because 1) we are not crying because a person has died, but because we will never get to see them again, and 2) if we are in fact crying over death, than we are ignorant to think that this life is the best we are ever offered. That’s not to say that crying is a bad thing, but it is why people can say they only want the best for Ramon Sampedro, while denying him his right to freedom. As if anyone but Roman would know what is best for himself.

The Sea Inside continues the tradition of films that must be based on true stories, because very few people these days can dream up characters as original or as interesting as real people; a character is just an idea on paper, a person already comes with a built in story. I say this because I just finished watching Kinsey, another film about a truly original character who knew everything about the science of humans, but nothing about human nature. Now comes this film about Ramon Sampedro, a quadriplegic who fought a twenty-eight year battle to end his own life, which kind of makes you wonder why he wouldn’t have saved the trouble and held his breath for two minutes?

Ramon is a man who has no feeling in his body, due to a diving accident. He now only has the use of his neck and feels that his life has been robbed of any dignity. “Five feet is nothing to a normal person, but to me the five feet between us is an impossible journey.” He tells Julia, a lawyer who also suffers from a disease, although not as crippling.

Of course laws in Spain prohibited anyone from assisting Ramon with his quest to die with dignity. Here is where director Alejandro Amenabar takes the material in a direction we do not expect. Amenabar openly passes up opportunities for the film to become political or make any sort of social comment. Instead he treats the story like a character study of a man who is more interesting than the plot that surrounds his circumstances.

The movie is not so much concerned with Ramon’s conquest for death, but more about the feelings and emotions that make it up. Amenabar’s intentions are not to tell us that life is the right choice; he is instead, more concerned with analyzing why a crippled man would choose death, when many crippled men deal with life every day. And it does so by stepping back and taking an objective viewpoint towards the situation. The film deals with death so casually that, although you may not agree with the idea of mercy killing, you’ll understand why Ramon seeks this alternative, and maybe, just maybe, even sympathize with him. Amenabar is not trying to tell us that assisted suicide is right, but showing us why it is right for Ramon.

This issue, of course, would have caused much controversy when it was raised in 1968. The law was opposed, as it stated that it was an offence to take another persons life. The Catholic Church also opposed the matter, as they felt that a person’s life did not belong to a person at all but belonged to God. And since the body belonged to God it was against religious belief to take the body before God had intended it. What makes the Sea Inside work so well, is how it takes all of these aspects into consideration, but never allows the narrative to be taken over by them. The film knows that the choice lies within; the body may be Gods, but the soul is property of the individual, and we never forget this.

There are other key figures in Ramon’s life: he meets regularly with two women, one who sympathizes, and one who tries to convince him that life is worth living. He also has a nephew who he sees as his own son, a father who gives his grandson a hard time, and an older brother who will have no one dying in his house. But all of these characters fade into the background as at the heart of the film lies in a brilliant performance by Javier Bardem. Like Liam Neeson in Kinsey, Jamie Fox in Ray and Lionardo Decaprio in the Aviator, Bardem finds the humanity in his character. He plays Ramon as an unselfish man whose sole wish is what he feels to be the only way to redeem a life that has been taken away from him. That Bardem can play a man who smiles while answering the question, “why die?” is testament to big acting in small places.