Speak to Me
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Speak to Me ‘A credible glimpse of humankind at its best.’ BY JOHN PODHORETZ I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Movies are never more affecting than when they show us people behaving...
...The fi rst sentence he dictates, as she struggles to get used to the challenge, is “Don’t panic...
...Speak to Me ‘A credible glimpse of humankind at its best.’ BY JOHN PODHORETZ 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...
...It also gives the fi lm’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...
...There has been a great deal of talk about how The Diving Bell is a fl ight of the imagination, a wondrous effort to display the power of the mind, and an example of poetic fi lmmaking that succeeds as few fi lms ever have in offering a visual analogue to consciousness itself...
...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 depiction of JeanDominique 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...
...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 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, selfl ess, and loving people who surround him...
...At fi rst, the process is a frustrating horror for Bauby, but he surrenders himself to it...
...But if that were all there was to it, the movie would be a crashing bore, a pretentious labor, a work of towering vanity...
...To summarize The Diving Bell and the Butterfl y is to make it sound unbearably painful...
...We learn that he is the editor of Elle, the fashion magazine, a pretty groovy man-about-Paris...
...It is anything but...
...The constant repetition of the letters has a hypnotic, incantatory effect...
...He is also a match for Nicolas Sarkozy in the romantic fi delity department...
...He learns to communicate through blinking in response to a list of letters...
...The Diving Bell and the Butterfl y is, in the end, about the indelible quality of being understood...
...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...
...Henriette (Marie-Jos?e 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...
...C?line (Emmanuelle Seigner) is one of the four angels in human form the fi lm shows us...
...The fi rst 10 minutes we spend looking entirely through his eyes, which fl icker in and out of focus as they adjust to the world beyond the coma from which he has just emerged to fi nd himself the victim of “lockedin syndrome...
...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 fi lm that he may be the only person on earth who is a great actor in four different languages...
...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 C?line, the estranged mother of his children, rallies to his side, achieving a stoic and heroic serenity even as their horrifi ed and heartbroken children must cope with the inert mass their father has become...
...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...
...All we know of Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), as the movie begins, is that he is a patient in a hospital bed...
...Jos?phine (Marina Hands), the nurse who tends to him and is a devout believer, enlists the world’s prayers on his behalf...
...Perhaps The Diving Bell is all these things...
...And yet The Diving Bell and the Butterfl y is wonderful—absolutely, completely wonderful—and for reasons that its critical admirers do not entirely understand...
...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...
...Certainly its director, artworld hustler extraordinaire Julian Schnabel, would like the world to believe that no one has ever used the medium of fi lm as he has...
...I don’t think it could be any better, and there has rarely been a movie as moving as The Diving Bell and the Butterfl y. John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...The Diving Bell and the Butterfl y, a French fi lm produced by a Hollywood studio and directed by a painter from New York, is a glorious example...
...That the person who succeeds in making himself understood is about as diffi cult to understand as a person can be makes his achievement, and the achievement of the people around him, even more spectacular...
Vol. 13 • February 2008 • No. 23
