Do as eye say

Mathieu Amalric proves that less is more in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Actors have always loved the challenge of playing a physically disabled character, though the results usually vary in the extreme. For every performance that showcases bodily transformation and spiritual triumph, there are a dozen more that come off as calculated bids for awards or, worse, licenses to practice hysterical camp. (Remember amputee Ronald Reagan screaming, “Where’s the rest of me?” in King’s Row?) Yet it’s hard to imagine any leading man picking up the script for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the avant-garde adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir by painter-filmmaker Julian Schnabel (Before Night Falls), and thinking he’d
found the surefire route to a gold statuette. After suffering a massive stroke, Bauby, an editor for French Elle and a well-known bon vivant, fell into a coma; when he finally awoke, he was almost completely paralyzed. Then comes the fine print: Bauby could move only one eye. That’s it. Just one eye.

Thankfully, for both Schnabel and audiences, Mathieu Amalric wasn’t daunted by the prospect. A familiar face to art-house patrons who gravitate to contemporary Gallic cinema, the 42-year-old actor had made a name by playing quirky roles for filmmakers like André Téchiné (Alice and Martin) and Arnaud Desplechin (Kings and Queen). Viewers who momentarily glanced away during his brief role in Steven Spielberg’s Munich might have missed his turn altogether. But the way in which Amalric communicates Bauby’s need to transcend his imprisonment by using only voice-over narration and a single rolling orb is beyond anything the star has done before: As Bauby starts dictating his book via a coded series of blinks, the performance becomes the perfect example of communicating so much with so little.

“I didn’t want the character to rely on five hours of being in the make-up chair every morning,” Amalric says, sprawled on the sofa of an uptown hotel suite. “So we had an artist make a prosthetic to push my lip down, and we got a contact lens to make my good eye red. That was it; the rest was up to me. Luckily, I was surrounded by the doctors and nurses who took care of Bauby, so they were my mirrors. I’d constantly ask them, ‘When his hand fell, was it stiff or loose? Would I be allowed to do this? [He moves his jaw.] That’s too much? Which muscles could he move?’ ” As he describes Bauby’s physical limitations, Amalric slowly contorts his mouth and tilts his head. By the time he’s finished, the actor is completely immobile against the couch except for one rapidly moving eye. Then Amalric springs back up, grinning. “You have no idea how exhausting it is to do that all day long,” he says.

After reading the late author’s book (Bauby passed away in 1997), Julian Schnabel felt it was important to film the story in the actual hospital where Bauby stayed and, more important, to cast a French actor to play the role. He remembered Amalric from something he’d seen during a stint on the jury at the San Sebastián Film Festival. “I was lucky enough to catch the movie he did with Olivier Assayas [Late August, Early September],” Schnabel says. “It wasn’t just that he could do angry and funny; it was that he came off as completely real. He was the only one on the screen who didn’t seem like he was acting. The more I described how I envisioned the film in terms of using experimental images and sound, the more enthusiastic Mathieu got. He helped me a great deal in finding the pulse of the film.”

Though Amalric shudders at the notion that his minimalist performance has, ironically, generated Oscar buzz (“My life is complicated enough,” the star jokes), he claims that he’d already found his reward when he was first wheeled out in character. “The very first time the hospital staff saw me as Jean-Do, many of them started crying,” the actor says. “That told me they weren’t seeing me, they were seeing him. But really, we just wanted to show that Bauby never thought of himself as a martyr; I mean, this is a guy who was still trying to seduce his nurses and loved that women were fighting over him even though he couldn’t move. Bauby’s achievement in writing the book was extraordinary, but he was also a man who still loved fast cars and big tits.” Amalric laughs. “Just because he had a stroke didn’t mean he’d suddenly become a saint.”

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