When I first started watching Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I didn’t like it at all. Released around this time last fall, the Oscar-nominated film, originally published as the critically acclaimed, best-selling memoir Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, is Elle Magazine Editor-in-Chief Jean-Dominique Bauby’s story of the hope he held and the full life he lived despite being paralyzed completely, with only his left eyelid with which to communicate.
The memoir is, understandably, quite short. What I loved about it from the first chapter is that Jean-Do (as he'll affectionately be called for the remainder of this column) does not mince words; he says what he wants to say with a minimum yet describes things in detail when the occasion calls for it. My favorite chapters tended to be the shortest, because his economy for words never affected the point that each chapter was trying to make, and the shortest chapters often had the most meaning despite having the fewest words. The novel was a quick read, two sittings at the most, but I fell absolutely in love with it.
In a complete departure from the book, but with the intention of allowing the viewer to experience what Jean-Do went through, the movie opens with the author coming out of the coma and finding out that he is paralyzed. I would not have minded this departure so much (in fact, I first thought it was a neat way to open the film) if it had not gone on for nearly 40 minutes before it began to incorporate elements of the book. Had the film billed itself as the story of Jean-Do and included the writing of the memoir within it, the intro would have made sense. But, to call the film by the same name as the book, one does not expect that the first third of the film will not follow the writing and will, moreover, set the wrong tone. That first third of the film is uncomfortable and depressing; Jean-Do is not inspiring--he is angry. The grand point of his novel was that he was not angry about his condition, and it takes the rest of the film to recover that point.
Once the tone of the film shifted, and Schnabel began to draw directly from the memoir chapters, the film to...
