The Sea Inside...

Well I was wrong about Born Into Brothels being the feel good movie of the year. The Sea Inside (which also proclaims to be uplifting on its jacket) is the actual feel good movie of the year about quadriplegics who want to kill themselves. Yay! Paralysis! Suicide! What could be more uplifting?!

Apparently 2004 was a bummer of a year.

The Sea Inside is the true story of Ramon Sampedro, a Spanish man who was paralyzed from the neck down when he broke his neck diving into shallow water. He then spends 30 years fighting for his right to die, since he can't do it himself. Again, I'm not quite sure where the uplifting part comes into play. He somehow manages to acquire a harem of women, and his family loves him and takes care of him, and lots of people are fighting for him, but he loses every court battle, and the bottom line is that he thinks life as a quadriplegic isn't worth living at all. I guess this movie is a celebration of the right to choose: choose how you want to spend your life, or even if you want to live at all. But damn, this was sad.

My favorite scene involved a quadriplegic priest who goes on tv to offer a view opposite of Ramon's (that life is still worth living). He says he'd like to be able to talk to Ramon in person to try to convince him to live. He visits Ramon, who stays in his bed upstairs all the time, and refuses to come downstairs to talk to him. The priest's two helpers try to lug him in his wheelchair up the stairs, but they can't, so the priest tells one of the guys what he wants to tell Ramon, and the guy has to run up and down the stairs bringing messages back and forth.

No more "uplifting!" movies for a while. I re-rented Spellbound because I know the worst thing that will happen is that someone will spell succedaneum wrong.