More on The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

"Although it bears a passing resemblance to any number of generic stories of trial and uplift, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is sui generis," writes Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper. "It is a chronicle of death that is robustly alive, never bowing to defeat but never hiding the truth of what it confronts. It is terrifying and exhilarating, morbid and vivacious, sardonic and sentimental. Like Jean-Do's existence, it is something of a miracle." And he talks with Julian Schnabel.

"But what's more significant than the visual style of this film is the way Schnabel can take a static sequence - almost a painting, really, with a soundtrack - and make it shake with emotion," writes the Stranger's Annie Wagner. "It's the essential problem of a movie about a paralyzed man, and Schnabel nails it." And she, too, talks with Schnabel.

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a film about a man who experiences the catastrophe I most feared during my recent surgeries: 'locked-in syndrome,' where he is alive and conscious but unable to communicate with the world," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. The film "not what you could call inspirational, because none of us would think to be in such a situation and needing inspiration. It is more than that. It is heroic. Here is the life force at its most insistent, lashing out against fate with stubborn resolve."

"Thanks to Bauby's courageous and honest writing, and Schnabel's poetic interpretation, what could have been a portrait of impotence and suffering becomes a lively exploration of consciousness and a soaring ode to liberation," writes Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post, where Hank Stuever profiles Schnabel.

"A new kind of art movie, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly fuses experimental techniques with a highly accessible and sometimes humorous narrative; it’s deeply personal yet universal in its humanism," writes Andrea Gronvall in the Chicago Reader, where she notes two significant departures Schnabel's taken from Bauby's actual story.

Paul Brownfield meets Schnabel for the Los Angeles Times and finds him to be quite a fan of Mexican food.

Posted by dwhudson at December 24, 2007 4:48 AM