Speak to Me

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Movies are never more affecting than when they show us people behaving with nobility and treating each other with kindness.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a French film produced by a Hollywood studio and directed by a painter from New York, is a glorious example. To summarize The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is to make it sound unbearably painful. The movie tells the true story of a 43-year-old man struck down by a malady so severe that it leaves his entire body paralyzed save for his eyes and one eyelid–with his consciousness entirely intact. He learns to communicate through blinking in response to a list of letters. He manages to dictate a memoir of the experience using this unspeakably laborious process, only to contract pneumonia and die 10 days after the book is published.

And yet The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is wonderful–absolutely, completely wonderful–and for reasons that its critical admirers do not entirely understand. There has been a great deal of talk about how The Diving Bell is a flight of the imagination, a wondrous effort to display the power of the mind, and an example of poetic filmmaking that succeeds as few films ever have in offering a visual analogue to consciousness itself.

Perhaps The Diving Bell is all these things. Certainly its director, art-world hustler extraordinaire Julian Schnabel, would like the world to believe that no one has ever used the medium of film as he has. But if that were all there was to it, the movie would be a crashing bore, a pretentious labor, a work of towering vanity. It is anything but.

The movie is a miraculous feat not because of its abstract artistic goals, but because of its delicate, complex, and ultimately awe-inspiring portrait of the interplay between its nightmarishly inert but intellectually febrile protagonist and the dedicated, selfless, and loving people who surround him. The depiction of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s effort to be understood, and the efforts of others to understand him, provides us with a rare and credible glimpse of humankind at its best.

All we know of Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), as the movie begins, is that he is a patient in a hospital bed. The first 10 minutes we spend looking entirely through his eyes, which flicker in and out of focus as they adjust to the world beyond the coma from which he has just emerged to find himself the victim of “locked-in syndrome.” This is a condition so rare that the doctor who tells him about it must use the English words because there is no French name for it. We hear his thoughts, which are quizzical and confused and descend into despair only when one of his eyelids must be sewn shut to prevent a septic infection.

We learn that he is the editor of Elle, the fashion magazine, a pretty groovy man-about-Paris. He is a loving father to three children and a loving son to a vivid 92-year-old father (the peerless Max von Sydow, who proves with this film that he may be the only person on earth who is a great actor in four different languages). He is also a match for Nicolas Sarkozy in the romantic fidelity department. And yet Céline, the estranged mother of his children, rallies to his side, achieving a stoic and heroic serenity even as their horrified and heartbroken children must cope with the inert mass their father has become.

Céline (Emmanuelle Seigner) is one of the four angels in human form the film shows us. Joséphine (Marina Hands), the nurse who tends to him and is a devout believer, enlists the world’s prayers on his behalf. Henriette (Marie-Josée Croze) is determined to work out a way for Bauby to communicate, and devises a system where she recites the alphabet beginning with the most commonly used letters. She stops when he blinks once. At first, the process is a frustrating horror for Bauby, but he surrenders himself to it. The third is Claude (Anne Consigny), who is engaged to take his blinking dictation when he decides to write a book about his experience.

The first sentence he dictates, as she struggles to get used to the challenge, is “Don’t panic.”

The brilliance of the screenplay and direction is evident from the way Schnabel and scenarist Ronald Harwood eagerly grasp hold of the letter recitation and use it to the movie’s advantage. The constant repetition of the letters has a hypnotic, incantatory effect. It also gives the film’s actresses an unparalleled opportunity to show off their chops, since they are, in effect, playing both their own characters and Bauby. And they do all of it beautifully.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is, in the end, about the indelible quality of being understood. That the person who succeeds in making himself understood is about as difficult to understand as a person can be makes his achievement, and the achievement of the people around him, even more spectacular. I don’t think it could be any better, and there has rarely been a movie as moving as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.