The Hemlock Society Presents The Diving Bell & the Butterfly
A muddy, overly-photographed “feel good” film about human suffering. Phooey! If Julian Schnabel truly wanted to stir empathy within us, why did he treat his lead character like the Frankenstein monster? He stops just short of panning up from the feet to reveal...well, an actor buried underneath so much makeup that it’s hard to call what Mathieu Amalric does a performance. Or is it a supporting performance? Borrowing liberally from the Dark Passage school of subjective cinematography, Schnabel sees to it that the sight of our hero’s face — he’s just recently snapped out of a coma brought on by a massive stroke — is withheld for a good twenty minutes. Why add humiliation to injury by transforming a character’s physical condition into an overused element of suspense? On top of everything else, it was produced by Kennedy/Marshall and photographed by Janusz Kaminsky. This thing has Spielberg’s fingerprints all over it. But I love Faye Gersh for making it the Hemlock Society’s movie of the month. No one else in this town has her way of taking movies I hate and making sense out of them.