It's a bit of shame that The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Julian Schnabel's aptly claustrophobic adaptation of the late Jean-Dominique Bauby's improbable memoir, will represent most American viewers' first lengthy encounter with Mathieu Amalric, France's greatest contemporary actor. (Some will recall his brief but indelible turn as Eric Bana's primary contact in Munich.) Which is not say that Amalric is miscast in the role, by any means. Bauby was a well-known bon vivant and the Paris editor of Elle magazine when he suffered a massive cerebrovascular stroke while at the wheel of his car on December 8, 1995. Awakening from a coma three weeks later, he found himself completely paralyzed; the only muscles still within his control were those attached to his left eyelid. Horrified to learn that he would likely spend the rest of his short life encased in this tomb, Bauby somehow summoned the strength of will to write a book from his hospital bed, dictating sentences one character at a time — he would listen as a stenographer recited the alphabet (in order of frequency in the French language), blinking to indicate that she'd reached the letter he wanted. Unreal.
With his unusually expressive and already slightly bulging eyes, Amalric makes an ideal Bauby; the disjunction between his sarcastic and penetrating thoughts (heard in voiceover) and his imploring, stricken gaze is genuinely heartrending. Still, it's inevitably something of a stunt performance, and the movie, while perfectly watchable, is a bit of a stunt as well. For two full reels — nearly forty minutes of screen time — we see the world exclusively from Bauby's stationary vantage point, even losing half the image when his useless right eye is sewn shut. Schnabel clearly wants us to feel as trapped as his afflicted hero, but the first-person camera style is so unnatural (see also Lady in the Lake) that it invariably comes across as gimmicky; once the film settles into a more conventional visual rhythm, time spent inside Bauby's metaphorical diving bell becomes far more affecting. (The butterfly represents his imagination.) Nobody with an ounce of empathy could fail to be moved by the true story of this volume's painstaking creation. Still, it's the real-life story, not the artistry involved in its telling, that does all the heavy lifting here. All Schnabel does is avoid screwing it up. — Mike D'Angelo