After Julian Schnabel made his directorial debut with the 1996 biopic Basquiat, the art critic Robert Hughes called it a movie about the worst painter of the 1980s, made by the second worst. (Because Schnabel cast it from the ranks of all his fashionable New York character actor friends, he also made it possible for The New Yorker's Anthony Lane to describe it as the kind of movie in which "Christopher Walken passes for normal.") Rather surprisingly, Schnabel has kept at it, and now, seven years after his remarkable second film Before Night Falls, he's back with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the acclaimed memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby.
The movie, like the book, recounts Bauby's struggle with near-total physical paralysis after he had suffered a massive stroke. Bauby wrote the book by "dictating" it, one letter at a time, by blinking his left eye. He died, at forty-five, days after the book was published. In the movie, he is played by Mathieu Amalric, of Munich and Kings and Queen, widely known among U.S. audiences as "that guy who looks like Roman Polanski's nicer brother."
This Times article tells the story: the producer Kathleen Kennedy had originally bought the rights to the book and was set to make it with Johnny Depp in the lead, and Depp, another celebrity friend of Schnabel's, brought him in to direct it before being forced to abandon it himself, due to his commitment to what Schabel calls "that pirate thing." Kennedy stuck with Schnabel, though, even after he insisted on making the film with a mostly French cast, and in French, which the studio probably thought was a hell of a consolation prize for not getting to make it with Johnny Depp. It all seems to have turned out all right; Schnabel won the best director prize at Cannes, and the movie's glittery trailer looks beautiful and even, in a strange way, kind of joyful. The only problem is that Schnabel, who is stubbornly atached to his identity a painter, is now becoming known to some, much to his dismay, as a movie maker. The good news is that he tries not to hold it against them. "I don’t think that people know too much about painting. I don’t think that they really understand what it is. I mean, I don’t want to put anybody down. I just think more people understand the language of movies than of paintings." Sadly, the question of whether he thinks Robert Hughes might be one of those people either never comes up in his interviews or has yet to yield a printable response. — Phil Nugent