The Diving Bell and the Butterfly *****

How do you tell the story of a successful magazine editor who suffers a stroke that leaves his mind intact but his body totally useless except for one eye without it becoming:

A. a bad disease of the week movie
B. a bore
C. Sentimental and schmaltzy
D. depressing
E. all of the above?

Well, you might look at Julian Schnabel's Diving Bell and the Butterfly for clues, because this film is not only none of the above, it is the opposite of A, B, C, and D.

Surely, he had an amazing starting place. This is a true story, adapted from the memoir of the protagonist, who wrote it using an incredibly long series of blinks from his one good eye. The title comes from his likening of his body to a diving suit (for some reason called a diving bell in English), and of his mind to a butterfly.

How do you tell a story from the point of view of a severely disabled man? Well, for a large portion of the beginning of the moview, Schnabel uses just that, a point of view shot, where the camera stands in for the man's one good eye as he tries to make sense of what has happened to him after he awakens from a week-long coma after the stroke.

Sound awful? It's fascinating, actually. By introducing the man this way, Schnabel forces us to identify with this guy. The POV shot makes us him. We even get to hear his inner monolog as he answers doctor's questions without realizing that they are not coming out as words. Just like him, we are the only ones who hear them. And just like that, we can understand him and his situation quickly and at a level that couldn't be attained any other way.

Eventually, we get flashbacks of his life in the form of memories as they slowly come back to him, interspersed with scenes of his therapy and visits from various significant friends and family. By the time Schnabel uses traditional shots of the man as a subject in the frame, we already know so much about him that there is little emotional space left for trite responses. It is the difference in feeling between being a close friend of a victim and reading about the same victim in a newspaper (or blog, nowadays). And that makes all the difference in the world.

In this way, Schnabel avoids all the pitfalls of such a story a delivers instead, a moving and rich experience. I came out of the theater keyed up, as though I had been recharged in there. It is easily the best movie I have seen this year. Highly, highly recommeded.