Summary
When a quadriplegic man decides that he no longer wishes to live, those people around him struggle to understand his wishes, their relationships, and his life.
My Thoughts
Unfortunately, I think this is a film in which many people will know, right from the outset, they have no interest.
It’s about death. Not quick unexpected surprise death either. The idea of seeing your death coming from years away with all that time to contemplate it might get some folk down.
It’s about right to die issues. People’s political, religious, and moral sensibilities might cause them to turn away from this film.
It’s a movie without answers. It doesn’t know what happens after we die or what the best way of handling end of life issues is and it doesn’t pretend to. It just lets the issue be the stage for a small, thought and emotion provoking drama and allow audiences to do with it what they will.
Few movies stick with me as long as this one will. This is not because I loved this movie. I didn’t. I really liked it but I have no intention of buying it. I’d certainly watch it again but only in the right circumstances.
The reason that this movie will stick with me for so long is that the subject is close to my heart. For whatever reason, end of life care, the right to die movement, and the personal meaning that relationships can bring to a life are all issues that break my heart and occupy my mind, much of the time.
As a result, movies like “The Sea Inside,” “Cries and Whispers,” ”The Sacrifice,” and “Big Fish” always stick in my mind and replay as I think about the tremendous challenges that are coming to our country in the next 10-30 years. Even if that were not the case, we all have an appointment with death one day and thinking about how we want to meet that day has real value for our lives.
That is what this film was for me. A chance to live in a home which revolves around the death of a man and how all those around him learn to cope with and love him, some more successfully than others.
We are a culture that doesn’t like to think about death much. We like our movies to lay waste to hundreds of robots, aliens, and even people but never dwell on their deaths unless it is a heroic moment. As a result, many of us do not think about death at all till it is at our doorstep or visits one of our loved ones.
With “The Sea Inside,” we are presented a marvelous opportunity to look at a situation which seems far away from us most of the time, and we get to see it from a great variety of perspectives.
We see Ramon’s brother and other family members caring for him, each in their own way, listening and caring in sometimes imperfect and selfish ways, yet still sure that what they do is loving. It uses these characters to ask questions about what love is. Is it giving someone what they want even when what they want is to cease to exist?
There is a sense in which this film asks questions of each of us and even asks questions of God, who allows a man to live in an imprisoning body without the means to release himself from his bonds through suicide and surrounds him with loved ones who will not do as he asks.
The Hebrew Poet and Teacher wrote, “It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart.”
That is what this film is. It is to enter into the pain and final test that waits for us all and ask how we will meet that end. Will we go kicking and screaming, willingly, or even eagerly? No one can know but perhaps spending a little time thinking about it every once in a while could be a good thing, even if it isn’t “fun.”
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