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OPENING christmas day: THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY

Diving Bell among year's best

December 24, 2007
Peter Howell
Movie Critic
http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/288349

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Starring Mathieu Amalric, Marie-Josée Croze, Emmanuelle Seigner, Max von Sydow and Olatz Lopez Garmendia. Directed by Julian Schnabel. 111 minutes. At the Cumberland. PG

"My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations," actor Michael Fox says in the January issue of Esquire.

He's referring to the Parkinson's disease that has ravaged his nervous system and radically altered his life, which he has transformed into a model of community service and personal humility.

Fox's profound quote comes to mind in assessing Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a movie about finding the happiness within forced acceptance and drastically constricted expectations.

It's the fact-based story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the rakish editor of Elle magazine's French edition, who awoke at age 43 from stroke-induced coma to find himself a rare victim of "locked-in syndrome," an affliction that leaves the mind intact but the body almost completely paralyzed.

The only movement Bauby could make was to flicker his left eyelid. Yet with the assistance of an ingenious alphabet system devised by his physical therapist, he was able to write the book that gives the movie its intriguing title, and which writer Ronald Harwood (The Pianist) has turned into a screenplay that is by turns deeply affecting and wryly amusing.

The movie is directed by the artist and occasional filmmaker Schnabel (Basquiat, Before Night Falls), who specializes in stories of unique individuals and who takes an abstract painter's approach to visuals.

Working with lensman Janusz Kaminski, Schnabel challenges his audience by presenting the first 40 minutes of the movie mainly from the bewildered, blurred and terrified point of view of Bauby, who is played by French actor Mathieu Amalric with miraculous empathy.

I admit that when I first saw Diving Bell at Cannes last May, this claustrophobic device struck me as contrived and almost painful to watch. A second viewing revealed something that Schnabel instinctively knew, and for which he was justly awarded the director's prize at Cannes: it's one thing to express sympathy for a man in Bauby's situation; it's quite another to actually feel what it's like to be in it.

Schnabel resists the temptation to make Bauby seem supernaturally stoic or worthy of pity. Bauby was a man of many flaws, as he freely admits from within the "diving bell" of his physical imprisonment.

He's initially reluctant to co-operate with his many doctors and nurses, spurning their expressions of hope and offers of help: "Just be a doctor," he thinks when one of them offers to be his friend.

And Bauby was no saint before his stroke. He abandoned his wife and three children to take up with a mistress, and he failed to contact a friend who spent four years in a terrorist prison because of something Bauby did as a favour: he gave up a seat in an airplane that was ultimately hijacked.

The friend pays a visit to Bauby in hospital, offering poignant contrast: he's now free and Bauby is in a far worse jail.

Other visitors provoke mixed feelings of love and remorse: Bauby's beautiful wife (Emmanuelle Seigner) stands by him in ways his mistress doesn't; his elderly father (Max von Sydow) weeps at the sudden knowledge that his son requires a newborn's care once again.

Bauby hears that the fashionistas he used to cavort with have written him off as a lost cause, a "vegetable" beyond help.

"What kind of a vegetable?" he wonders. "A carrot? A pickle?"

A cloddish surgeon regales Bauby with a story of the great ski trip he's just been on, even as he's permanently sewing shut the lid of Bauby's ruined right eye.

Quebec's Marie-Josée Croze delivers the most moving performance of all, in the role of the speech therapist who devises the eye-blink alphabet system that frees Bauby's undamaged mind, allowing him to use "the butterfly" of his unlimited imagination.

She does not coddle Bauby nor tolerate his initial rudeness and despair. If there is any justice this awards season, Croze will be recognized with an Oscar nomination.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is one of the best movies of 2007, but I'd argue it's also the one most in tune with what this season of goodwill and tolerance is supposed to be all about.

Bauby's tightrope walk between acceptance and expectations, to quote Michael J. Fox's eloquence again, is an invitation for introspection. Let us all give thanks for our abundant blessings and moan just a little bit less about small inconveniences we wrongly perceive as suffering.