Two Ways to Die
I went to see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly last week and it surprised me. Did I think it was going to be good? Yes. Did I think I would actually tear up at the end? No. I've always found Julian Schnabel slightly annoying. I thought those big painting with broken plates I had study in Art History class were pretentious and showy while not demonstrating anything new about painting. Oh, I'm sorry-they were Post-Modern, that movement responsible for many pretentious creations, from paintings to buildings to tea kettles. It was the word of choice to describe something the viewer perhaps didn't understand or was too lazy to find another description. Post-Modern involved taking something old and placing it in a new context-the Chippendale headboard on a skyscraper in New York-or in Schnabel's case, taking old plates, smashing them and building a painting around them. And was Schnabel-larger than life, always wearing pajama bottoms and painting a building down in SoHo in New York bright pink. He annoyed me and I was prepared not to like this movie despite every good review it had gotten-I only went because he got a nod for Best Director from the Academy so I was curious.
Fine-he proved me wrong. Diving Bell is a beautiful movie. Straightfoward, funny, unsentimental about facing death but with a heart. Jean-Do had locked-in syndrome-had a stroke and now can only comminicate by blinking his right eye. However, his brain works perfectly well. He tells his story to the woman who writes it down faithfully-but we hear all his thoughts and his feelings about being locked into the diving bell of his body, a prisoner. His friends and children come to visit but don't know quite what to say. His father is trapped as well-90 years old cant handle the stairs in his apartment building, he is as trapped in his apartment as Jean-Do is in his body.
Don't go to see this movie if you expect something to happen-it's not about that. It's about something awful happening and finding a way to live with it, to make it mean something and to learn from it. I hate movies that are about "the human spirit"-most are silly and mawkish. This movie is the opposite of that, in the best way.
And then there's The Wind That Shakes the Barley. This movie is also not sentimental at all about the Irish fight for freedom from Great Britain. Two brothers take up opposite sides in the fight. One (Cillian Murphy) fights the Brits in a guerilla war, while his brother takes up the British side and joins their army.
There can be no happy ending in a situation like this when two family members are on opposite sides of a war. Murphy knows his cause is just but he also knows he's probably on the losing side. "Do you know how many soldiers they have here in Ireland?"he asks before joining up. "How many do we have? How many guns?" But he joins the cause anyway, while his brother, who once fought on the same side, now finds himself on the on the other side.
There's also a fascinating side to this-the class war. The English are invariably wealthy and Catholic, the Irish are poor, downtrodden and Protestant. To watch the rich English behaving as if the irish are their slaves and theirs to do with what they will (which usually involves some sort of torture) is both creepy and enlightening. And to an American who has always found the British class system and the Church's role in it, interesting from a sociological point of view, it was great albeit horrible.
Yes, it comes down to a moment of truth-who do you betray? Your country or your brother? Who or what will you die for? Will you know what you're fighting for and dying for?
I don't want to comment on any one person's performance-they were all good and there was not one moment that rang false in the whole thing-but it was very sad and fairly violent, as befits a story about a civil war.
Fine-he proved me wrong. Diving Bell is a beautiful movie. Straightfoward, funny, unsentimental about facing death but with a heart. Jean-Do had locked-in syndrome-had a stroke and now can only comminicate by blinking his right eye. However, his brain works perfectly well. He tells his story to the woman who writes it down faithfully-but we hear all his thoughts and his feelings about being locked into the diving bell of his body, a prisoner. His friends and children come to visit but don't know quite what to say. His father is trapped as well-90 years old cant handle the stairs in his apartment building, he is as trapped in his apartment as Jean-Do is in his body.
Don't go to see this movie if you expect something to happen-it's not about that. It's about something awful happening and finding a way to live with it, to make it mean something and to learn from it. I hate movies that are about "the human spirit"-most are silly and mawkish. This movie is the opposite of that, in the best way.
And then there's The Wind That Shakes the Barley. This movie is also not sentimental at all about the Irish fight for freedom from Great Britain. Two brothers take up opposite sides in the fight. One (Cillian Murphy) fights the Brits in a guerilla war, while his brother takes up the British side and joins their army.
There can be no happy ending in a situation like this when two family members are on opposite sides of a war. Murphy knows his cause is just but he also knows he's probably on the losing side. "Do you know how many soldiers they have here in Ireland?"he asks before joining up. "How many do we have? How many guns?" But he joins the cause anyway, while his brother, who once fought on the same side, now finds himself on the on the other side.
There's also a fascinating side to this-the class war. The English are invariably wealthy and Catholic, the Irish are poor, downtrodden and Protestant. To watch the rich English behaving as if the irish are their slaves and theirs to do with what they will (which usually involves some sort of torture) is both creepy and enlightening. And to an American who has always found the British class system and the Church's role in it, interesting from a sociological point of view, it was great albeit horrible.
Yes, it comes down to a moment of truth-who do you betray? Your country or your brother? Who or what will you die for? Will you know what you're fighting for and dying for?
I don't want to comment on any one person's performance-they were all good and there was not one moment that rang false in the whole thing-but it was very sad and fairly violent, as befits a story about a civil war.
posted by SHbookworm at 9:08 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home