True story dominated by ferocious resilience

Published 2:56 pm Thursday, December 20, 2007

Though it was a best-selling memoir, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” presents a particular test for moviemakers. The main character is completely immobile.

Correction: not completely. He can blink one eye.

This extraordinary challenge has been taken up by director Julian Schnabel, who makes the occasional film when he isn’t being one of America’s most famous visual artists. His other movies, “Basquiat” and “Before Night Falls,” were also based on the lives of real people.

The real person in this case was Jean-Dominique Bauby, the jet-setting editor of Elle magazine in France. Bauby’s glamorous existence came to a screeching halt in 1995, when he suffered a stroke at age 43 and was left with “locked-in syndrome.”

Unable to move anything but one eyelid, Bauby nevertheless managed to write his memoir … one letter at a time. In telling this story, the film makes you live through this incredible feat, which makes the climbing of Mount Everest look like an indulgent holiday.

Schnabel begins the film through Bauby’s bewildered perspective, literally, as he wakes up in a seaside hospital and it dawns on him that he cannot move or speak. We can hear actor Mathieu Amalric’s voice on the soundtrack, speaking his interior monologue, but we don’t actually see him until the movie is well under way.

Amalric (“Late August, Early September”) is one of Europe’s most gifted actors (he’ll be the next James Bond villain, by the way), and this role is certainly a trial. Except for a few flashbacks, we see him barely moving — but his open eye blazes with a fury that communicates a ferocious I’m-still-here-ness.

One of his therapists (Marie-Josee Croze) uses a method of reciting the alphabet — most frequently-used letters first — so that Bauby can communicate by blinking at the desired letter.

Does this sound boring to watch? It’s not, not if you’re invested in Bauby’s struggle. Not all movies have to be sweeping spectacles; in this case, a movie might be a man lying in bed, blinking out his life’s work.

Ronald Harwood, author of “The Pianist,” adapted the book. Amalric’s performance is surrounded by a collection of beautiful actresses, whose beauty here is not mere decoration, but a mark of Bauby’s life force (even in his paralysis, he can, and must, gaze longingly at a nurse’s cleavage). They include Emmanuelle Seigner, Olatz Lopez Garmendia and Anne Consigny, all excellent. Max von Sydow, no less a beauty, plays Bauby’s father.

The very simplicity of Schnabel’s approach underlines the film’s portrait of just how stupefyingly resilient the human spirit can be, even when pushed to a cruel extreme. As we watch the film, we can’t help multiplying Bauby’s grueling routine through all the minutes of the day, and marvel at the effort. And think about how we might rise to a similar occasion.