Home > Movies > Movie Review > The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

A movie—about a man left with only his mind—to enliven your eyes and heart

By Matt Pais

November 30, 2007

Critic's Rating:

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In 1995, 43-year-old Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Almaric) suffered a massive stroke that left him in a coma for nearly three weeks. When he awoke, he was completely paralyzed, unable to speak and with the use of only one eye. (The rare condition is called locked-in syndrome.) With his one good eye, he communicated through blinking—once for yes, twice for no, and once when he heard a letter he wanted to use in a word—and dictated the novel, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”

Big question: How can this movie by director Julian Schnabel (“Before Night Falls”), who won the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, possibly capture such an amazing story?

Catch it: Schnabel takes us inside Bauby’s mind with a collage of spellbinding memories and fantasies, recreating spontaneous brain activity that keeps alive, in more ways than one, a man who’s physically a shell of his former self. The movie’s a transfixing journey from shame to guilt to extraordinary accomplishment, with a sensational visual palette and the kind of familial and everyday humanity that provides a year’s worth of hope that the world is, in fact, a wonderful place in spite of so much sadness.

Skip it: If you cracked up at “Good Luck Chuck.” As Bauby recalls, a poet once said, “Only a fool laughs when nothing’s funny.”

Bottom line: So simultaneously uplifting and heartbreaking that your chest might short-circuit, “The Diving Bell” is a movie of extremes: of unimaginable pain and unbelievable generosity; of incredible ugliness and overwhelming beauty; of fate’s ability to give unendingly and then take nearly all of it away. This is not a movie that you shake off easily—maybe ever—and one that makes you want to go out and gulp down every ounce of life you can squeeze into your glass.

Bonus: Speech therapist Henriette (Marie-Josée Croze) first lists E, S, A, R, I and N to Bauby because those are the most commonly used letters in France. Nice to know what replaces RSTLNE in the French version of “Wheel of Fortune”!

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