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
