Lush 'Diving Bell' explores imagination

Of all the great films up for awards at this year's Oscars, none has a premise that seems as alienating as that of "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." Unlike the other nominated films, many of which explore sweeping landscapes of war and crime, this movie focuses on a man who is suddenly paralyzed. Had the story been poorly executed, it could have been nothing more than a somber and boring tearjerker. Yet to his credit, director Julian Schnabel crafts this strange tale into an illuminating, compassionate and oddly liberating experience on the screen.

The film brings to life the memoirs of Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric). Bauby was once a successful editor for ELLE magazine, but his life is changed forever when a freak stroke leaves him in a coma for three weeks. Upon waking, he discovers that though his mind remains completely intact, he has lost all control of his body except for his left eye. The author and journalist is suddenly without words and struggles to find means to express himself. At one point, the patient even takes objection to the notion that he is a brain-dead vegetable, asking himself, "What am I, a carrot?" As he learns to cope, Bauby reassesses his missteps in life and grows closer to those he drove away before being met by catastrophe. The man's active intelligence makes "Diving Bell" an intriguing narrative as he continues to feel pangs of lust and regret.

Schnabel, an Academy Award nominee for Best Director, captures Bauby's overriding entrapment through simple yet decidedly effective means. For much of the film, the audience sees the world through Bauby's left eye. This limited perspective, coupled with a continual voiceover that expresses the patient's thoughts in a stream-of-consciousness style, allows the viewer to understand a man stripped of his physical freedom. So effective is Schnabel's framing in these scenes that the viewer even feels Bauby's frustration when an absent-minded nurse shuts off the football game he has been watching enthusiastically. In quiet scenes like these, Schnabel makes the limits of Bauby's condition seem real and even graspable.

But the film itself is far richer than a simple meditation on confinement. Besides his eye, the two things unaffected by the stroke, Bauby says, are his imagination and his memory. When Schnabel presents the author's fantasies onscreen, the film breaks away from the oppressive confines of the wheelchair. For instance, a simple IV drip transforms into a four-course meal at a three-star restaurant. Whereas in the real world, the physically constrained Bauby can only stare longingly at the women he desires, in his mind's eye he becomes a veritable Casanova. These fantasy sequences, shot with lush colors, contrast sharply with the sterile, gray settings of the patient's bedroom. Bauby's daydreams stand as an exhilarating testament to the power of the mind to transcend even the most hopeless of realities.

Though "Diving Bell" is very much Schnabel's show, Amalric delivers a startlingly expressive performance given the role's physical constraints. While he plays the debonair editor before his stroke with an appropriate mix of humor and disdain, the actor truly shines when Bauby is confined to a hospital room. With no more than a combination of blinks and soft grunts, Amalric conveys a range of emotions, from sadness to joy, as the character begins to master his great disability. Amalric's near-silent but affecting portrayal illustrates his character's anguish with a subtlety that perfectly fits Schnabel's often understated direction.

Schnabel's one misstep occurs when he presents Bauby's glamorous life before his stroke. During these scenes, the fashion editor laughs with executives and mingles with half-naked models. To further reinforce that the jetsetter once lived the high life, Schnabel presents a scene where Bauby cruises around Paris in a vintage convertible. A pulsating techno track plays throughout the kinetic, fast-paced sequence. These flashbacks, set outside the patient's own fantasies, seem inauthentic and forced in an otherwise deeply convincing and personal production.

In spite of these quirks in presentation, Schnabel has crafted a one-of-a-kind film. Through his continual ingenuity, the filmmaker renders comprehensible a perspective that seemingly could never be understood. Film can do much more than tell a simple love story or a shallow action adventure. "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" unveils the medium's power to open your eyes to unbelievable hardship and sometimes, to inexpressible triumph.