The Diving Bell & The Butterfly (2007/Miramax DVD)

 

Picture: C     Sound: C+     Extras: C     Feature: C

 

 

One of last year’s most obnoxious and overrated films is easily Julian Schnabel’s too gimmicky and smug for its own good The Diving Bell & The Butterfly (2007) about a man who is coming out of a coma, can hardly stay awake and is trapped from an accident that almost killed him.  He can think and we here him talk often, but he cannot talk to those around him.  For the first half-hour or so, we get this with shaky camerawork that goes nowhere, distorted images and soft images that are supposed to be the incoherence of his point of view, but are never totally convincing as so.

 

Then the Ronald Harwood script is sentimental as he flashes back to his life in bits and pieces, though the victim has fallen apart as well.  After about two-hours of this, you learn very little about this man and are actually invited in very lazy filmmaking to project yourself (no pun intended) into his life and imagine what the experience would be like.  Too bad the film cheats to make this point, with al the praise working more like The Kuleshov Effect (exiting one ambiguous image of a man’s face with various images in editing to create the effect he is reacting to them when he is not even seeing them) than any iota of a character study.  That is why in the long run, most were not fooled by the hype.

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image is purposely softer than usual too often and hurts picture performance overall.  The Dolby Digital 5.1 is like a dialogue-based and has a limited soundfield.  Extras include Schnabel on Charlie Rose promoting the film, two featurettes and Schnabel audio commentary track.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo