I’ve been thinking about how infrequently I see really spectacular acting in film.  Most of what I watch is very good, with good performances throughout, but there are a select few movies in which I’ve felt that the actor or actress really went through a significant change, exerted an incredible effort, and actually became someone else.  In many movies, the actors are playing what amount to essentially tweaked versions of themselves, or, in the case of someone like Nicolas Cage, they play the exact same character, at the exact same register, in every goddamn movie.  But, usually once or twice a year, we get Charlize Theron in Monster or Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood.  I love these films, because there is such a sense of otherness, of consummate care and craft.

Tonight, I saw The Sea Inside, a Spanish film in which Javier Bardem (of recent No Country for Old Men fame) plays Ramon Sampedro, a quadriplegic who has been confined to a bed for 28 years.  Bardem, who must have been in his mid-thirties when playing the role, thanks to subtle makeup effects, looks startlingly like a fifty-five year old man.  The makeup is so good that if I hadn’t already seen Bardem on screen, I would have assumed he was actually as old as the character he was playing.  The film is able to play on this in a very interesting way.  We’ve all seen the gimmick.  In flashbacks, the younger version of the character is never the same actor, but always someone with a rough approximation of the facial structures and hair color, and we have to take on faith is the younger version of our protagonist.  In The Sea Inside, the younger incarnation of Ramon is much closer to Bardem’s actual age, and it is the character in the present that is the construction.  It’s incredibly satisfying, and gives a weight to the flashback sequences as I’ve rarely seen in films, because we do not have to suspend our disbelief to draw a link between the past and the present; it’s simply the same man.

Bardem’s performance was critically acclaimed, as well it should have been.  This performance was much more impressive to me than his turn as Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, although I thought that role was also incredible.

This marks the second excellent Spanish film I’ve seen in as many weeks, with the first being El Orfanato (released in the US as The Orphanage ).  I would highly recommend both for anyone who loves a moving story, stellar acting and skillful film-making.