Stop Calling 'Diving Bell' A Dark Film, Hollywood Reporter!

By Katey Rich

The Hollywood Reporter has a piece on their website that lays out what's pretty much been said over and over since September: this is an unusually dark crop of films up for awards consideration, and geopolitical attitudes are to blame. I generally find it obnoxious when a certain group of films are associated with a specific cultural cause, especially when they cover a huge range of topics (global terror! Wild West mythmaking! heroin addiction!) that don't lend themselves to being happily lumped together.

The generalizations get even wilder when looking at specific films-- yes, Sweeney Todd is plenty bloody and black, but the Stephen Sondheim musical has been around since the late 70s. Do you really think its movie adaptation now is because of the dark, somber mood of our times and not the number of years it took to develop a hugely successful property? Finally, the inclusion of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly really raised my hackles. "That story of a brilliant magazine editor who is almost completely paralyzed following a stroke and only able to communicate by blinking one eye might make one marvel at human courage, but its ending is no more optimistic than that of No Country [For Old Men] or [In the Valley of] Elah."

Absolutely not. Diving Bell does take on a tough subject matter, but Schnabel directs with such visual poetry and grace that the story is ultimately uplifting. It is not about a man with a terminal condition, or the tragedy of a life cut short, but of the power and resilience of the human spirit, and the flourishing of art in the most unlikely places. Jean-Dominique Bauby, as portrayed by Mathieu Amalric, is a figure of hope, a rejoinder to the complainers of the world that anyone can achieve their goals with the proper determination. It sounds like Doc Brown's advice to Marty McFly-- "If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything"-- but Schnabel uses his considerable skill to make a movie full of uplift with zero schmaltz.

I've written about Diving Bell here already, and probably will again-- it's absolutely one of my favorite movies of the year--and I don't want to belabor the issue. I'm willing to concede that this fall features some extraordinarily dark films, but throwing Diving Bell in with that group is unfair to the film. A French-language drama about a man in a wheelchair is a tough sell as it is, and the lyric beauty of Diving Bell must be emphasized in order to get anyone to see it. Better yet, don't define any of these movies as "issue films"-- let them stand on their own, say what they need to say, and leave the political discussion until after they've had a chance to play, carrying their own intended meaning and nothing more.