The Sea Inside is a difficult problem. It’s enthralling, heartbreaking, emotional, and beautiful. It’s a celebration of life, in many ways. It makes you want to live, and it makes you want to live well. It makes you appreciative of the life you have in a way that many of the best films fail to. All at the same time, it’s disturbingly supportive – even defensive – of euthanasia.

The Sea Inside is the last 15 minutes of Million Dollar Baby drawn out into over two hours. Ramon Sampedro (Javier Bardem) was paralyzed in a diving accident when he was about twenty and has been living, immobile, for decades. Though he has made much of his life – in writing letters with his mouth, inventing things with his mind, friendship with many people – he has become tired of himself and wishes to be no longer. Throughout the film Ramon struggles, against his family and the government, for the right to die.

The Sea Inside could have been a classic. I left the film shaking and crying like I have not done in some time. The film suffers, however, from two major problems.

The first is the simple fact that the movie is way too long. You don’t need more than two hours to tell this story. I finally figured out what the problem was, why the prolonged script. It’s a BIOPIC. Well, it only covers a few years, but it’s based on a true story. Suddenly, all the unnecessary additions made sense. Apparently it’s all there because it happened that way. But “it happened that way” does not a good story make. The Sea Inside could have been just as effectively – and just as powerfully – told in an hour’s time.

The larger problem is the film’s final approval of Ramon’s suicide. Aside from any personal objections to euthanasia, the suicide really does not work on the aesthetic level. The film spends a lot of time trying to tell us what a valuable life Ramon’s has been. It wants us to cherish his life and then it wants us to celebrate when he finally succeeds in terminating himself. It doesn’t work. If it had wanted us to celebrate his suicide, it needed to do a better job at convincing us as how miserable and pointless his life really was. The film needed to make us want to kill Ramon out of pity so that we would sympathize. Instead, the film made us love him and want to save him at all costs. In his review of Million Dollar Baby, Orson Scott Card perceptively notes that there are no good stories that end in suicide – no matter how noble. The same is true with The Sea Inside. No matter what it has in its lead up, the story cannot end a good one.

The Sea Inside is, however, a much more well thought out discussion of the issue than Million Dollar Baby. In contrast to Maggie Fiztgerald’s hissy fit of self-pity that led her to insist on killing herself, Ramon Sampedro has had many long years to contemplate his life. He has lived a relatively long life in paralysis and wants the rest of his family to be able to live out the rest of their lives without being tied to taking care of him. At times, his case is fairly convincing.

But not convincing enough. If anything, Ramon convinces us that life is wonderful. Any life. “The Sea Inside” refers to the peace that Ramon has been able to find within himself. The beach of paradise that he can walk to, run to, fly to and swim through. A world of magic within his own mind that can take him anywhere when times are down. Ramon convinces us that you can always retreat to the sea inside when you need to, but that most of the time you don’t need to – because life is something that’s worth living. It’s a great, grand lesson that would have amounted to a fantastic movie – if only Ramon had learned the lesson he so powerfully taught us.

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