'SEA INSIDE' FULL OF LIFE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

RAMON SAMPEDRO, a sailor from Spain's Celtic Galicia region, was paralyzed in a diving accident as a young man. Bedridden for the next 30 years, he became a well-regarded poet and memoirist, and campaigned, relentlessly and with apparent good cheer, to be put out of his misery for good.

Played by the always-soulful Javier Bardem (``Before Night Falls'') in ``The Sea Inside,'' Sampedro never quite becomes the secular saint director and co-writer Alejandro Amenabar (``The Others'') tries to make him. This is all to Bardem's credit, as only the most radical advocates of compassionate euthanasia won't detect a smug self-righteousness in the film's unquestioning advocacy of Sampedro's right to die.

But, working mostly from the neck up (a few flashbacks and fantasy sequences add variety to a mostly flat-on-his-back performance), Bardem gives Sampedro enough vulnerability, fear and touchiness to keep the character's limp feet on the ground. Reportedly, the real Sampedro never cried, and rarely if ever dropped his pleasant demeanor no matter how much pain and frustration he was suffering. Wisely dismissing the facts in this case, Bardem delivers us a man, not a symbol.

Even better, the movie plays up the notion that, although sex was out of the question, most of Sampedro's final months were marked by woman troubles. The good kind, all based on love, but troublesome nonetheless.

Of the many females who flutter around his bed, three representative ones stand out. The fictional Julia (Belen Rueda), a big-city lawyer who moves into Sampedro's rural home in order to help him file his petitions, suffers from her own degenerative disease and bonds with her client on the deepest possible level. Local loser Rosa (Lola Duenas) comes by to convince Sampedro that life is sacred, gets properly chewed out for her efforts, and eventually discovers that he's the best man she's ever met. Through it all, Sampedro's sister-in-law Manuela (Mabel Rivera) quietly tends to the quadriplegic's every creature need and subtly supports his death-wish campaign, even though her husband and Ramon's older brother, Jose (Celso Bugallo), is quite Catholically against it. It's not your standard formula for jealousy, but it comes up anyway, amusing and believable.

Of course, Jose is depicted as not very bright. The film's main anti-euthanasia spokesman, a wheelchair-dependent priest, is set up as a pompous ass, though his and Sampedro's upstairs/downstairs shouting match is the film's comic high point. Amenabar is clearly not interested in debating the finer moral points of the death with dignity issue. He just wants ``The Sea Inside'' to be a life-affirming movie about assisted suicide, and he pretty much succeeds - as long as you don't think about it very hard.

THE SEA INSIDE - Three stars

(PG-13: language, sex)

Starring: Javier Bardem, Belen Rueda, Lola Duenas, Mabel Rivera.

Director: Alejandro Amenabar.

Running time: 2 hr. 5 min.

Playing: Town Center 5, Encino; Playhouse 7, Pasadena; Sunset 5, West Hollywood; Westside Pavilion, West L.A.; Monica, Santa Monica.

In a nutshell: Bardem's terrific, neck-up performance as a Spanish quadriplegic crusading for his right to die with dignity makes this worthwhile, despite a self-congratulating attitude of debatable political correctness. In Spanish and Galician with English subtitles.

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Javier Bardem and Belen Rueda star in ``The Sea Inside,'' the true story of a paralyzed man's fight to end his own life.