The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

"Whatever [Julian] Schnabel's posturings as a painter, he's a major film director, alive not only to light and texture but to characters' emotions - which twist the light and warp the textures and permeate the canvas," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Mathieu Amalric is heartbreaking in both his incarnations - as the lover in flashbacks and the légume (his word) in the present. It's his boyishness that gets to you: At 43, he has been hurled into the final stages of life before having had the chance to grow up, to atone, to contemplate his own mortality."

"You may think you've seen one too many 'uplifting' tales of handicapped heroes overcoming adversity: they are a staple of our therapeutically inclined culture," writes Newsweek's David Ansen. "[The Diving Bell and the Butterfly] is something else: ravishing to look at, mercifully unsentimental, blissfully avoiding almost every cliché of the genre."

Updated through 12/1.

The New Yorker's David Denby finds "some of the freest and most creative uses of the camera and some of the most daring, cruel, and heartbreaking emotional explorations that have appeared in recent movies.... [Jean-Dominique] Bauby's book is concise and lyrical; the film is expansive and sensual, pungent and funny - a much larger experience. The impossible subject has yielded a feast of moviemaking."

Michelle Orange talks with Amalric for IFC News.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes, Toronto and New York.

Update, 11/27: "It's the most sensually assaulting movie in recent memory with the possible exception of Michael Bay's Transformers, and yet many of the same people who criticized Bay for his attention-deficient aesthetics are falling over each other to praise Schnabel," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "Why? Because instead of ransacking the storehouse of commercial advertising for his inspiration, he steals his visual tricks from more highfalutin sources like Fellini and Stan Brakhage.... The Diving Bell and the Butterfly feels grotesquely calculated, especially the more Schnabel ratchets up the inspirational platitudes of exactly the sort that Bauby - who maintained an acerbic sense of humor about his situation until the very end - would have despised."

Update, 11/28: ST VanAirsdale has a note on Scott Foundas's review.

Updates, 11/29: "Painter, musician and general cultural dilettante, Schnabel shows genuine moviemaker instincts. Strangely, [Anton] Corbijn and other pseudo-biographers - such as Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant - don't." Armond White elaborates in the New York Press.

At the Reeler, ST VanAirsdale talks with Max von Sydow.

Jesse Ashlock gathers comments from a recent junket roundtable with Schnabel.

Online viewing tip. David Poland lunches with the bunch.

Updates, 11/30: "[C]uriously enough, a movie about deprivation becomes a celebration of the richness of experience, and a remarkably rich experience in its own right," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "In his memoir Mr Bauby performed a heroic feat of alchemy, turning horror into wisdom, and Mr Schnabel, following his example and paying tribute to his accomplishment, has turned pity into joy."

"With his unusually expressive and already slightly bulging eyes, Amalric makes an ideal Bauby; the disjunction between his sarcastic and penetrating thoughts (heard in voiceover) and his imploring, stricken gaze is genuinely heartrending," writes Mike D'Angelo for Nerve.

"The picture is so imaginatively made, so attuned to sensual pleasure, so keyed in to the indescribable something that makes life life, that it speaks of something far more elemental than mere filmmaking skill: This is what movies, at their best, can be," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek.

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly manages to be an exemplary film about the so-called triumph of the human spirit by largely upending every cliché the usual cinematic treatment of the triumph of the human spirit indulges," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny.

"Much of the picture's power derives directly from the fact that the narrative is defined by relationships rather than events. It is through these scenes - notably those involving Bauby's estranged wife (Emmanuelle Seigner) and increasingly infirm father (Max von Sydow) - that a portrait of the real man takes shape," writes Andy Klein. "It's an undeniably bold experiment by any measure, well worthy of the Best Director award Schnabel picked up at this year's Cannes Film Festival. But it's also an imperfect experiment, too often undone by its own ambitions." Also in the LA CityBeat, Rebecca Epstein talks with Schnabel.

"Perhaps the most unexpected thing about Diving Bell is that this constant repetition of spoken letters, which sounds tedious in the abstract, becomes, because of the use of the supremely melodic French language, an almost sensual pleasure," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "Finally finished with his pages, Bauby anxiously blinks the question, 'Does that make a book?' Indeed it does, and a most unexpected film as well."

"At times, Bell seems heightened and romanticized, particularly in the way everyone around Bauby remains supportive and attentive, even at their own expense," writes Tasha Robinson in the AV Club. "But that just prevents the film from becoming standard-arc disease-of-the-week fare, with its programmed trials and inevitable victories."

Online listening tip. Schnabel's on the FilmCouch.

Erica Abeel talks with Schnabel for indieWIRE.

"Schnabel has an alert, imaginative and unsentimental cinematic eye," writes Richard Schickel for Time. "He does everything he can to involve us in Jean-Do's struggle against stasis, which is perhaps less a 'triumph of the human spirit,' a fatuous phrase that ought to be banned from critical discourse, than it is a triumph of the human ego. This is all right with me - I don't think anything worthwhile is created without egotism pushing the effort along and it is good to see it functioning in such extreme circumstances. But still, somewhat shame-faced I have to admit that at some point in the film I began to hear a subversive voice whispering in my ear, and what it was saying was, 'Could you blink a little faster, pal?'"

Update, 12/1: "Amalric, previously best known in the United States as the neurotic, intellectual hero of the movies of Arnaud Desplechin (Kings and Queens, My Sex Life or How I Got Into An Argument) is a perfect choice for the part," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "A compact, cerebral actor, he's able to convey the brain at work behind that one left eye.... The figure Julian Schnabel cuts in the press - a Bacchanalian narcissist who openly revels in the money, power, and connections his artistic success has brought him - always makes me want to despise his movies. But his touch becomes finer with each one, and with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I have to cry 'uncle' - I don't know much about his paintings, but as a director, the guy is a true artist."

Posted by dwhudson at November 26, 2007 8:29 AM