Moviegoer Diary: American Gangster, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

AMERICAN GANGSTER

Plot in a Nutshell:
Denzel Washington is a ’70s Harlem drug kingpin and Russell Crowe is the New Jersey cop determined to bring him down.

Thoughts:
I spent the last couple of days catching up with the last few Oscar nominees I still hadn’t seen. (I don’t think I’ll ever get around to watching Elizabeth: The Golden Age or La Vie en Rose, though. I feel more guilty about that second omission than the first one, especially since Marion Cotillard looked like such a movie star when she accepted her Best Actress Oscar, but since Oscar-baiting musical biopics have replaced post-apocalyptic action movies and fantasy epics based on multi-volume children’s novels as my new least-favourite film genre, I think I’ll just wait to catch her next year opposite Johnny Depp in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies.)

Anyway: American Gangster! Wow... Ruby Dee is barely in this thing! I’m guessing she has less than five minutes of screen time—her performance might even be briefer than Judi Dench’s Oscar-winning turn in Shakespeare in Love. (Has anyone gotten out a stopwatch and actually calculated which performance is longer? I’d be curious to find out.)

Even though the bit where Dee slaps Denzel Washington after learning the extent to which he’s in trouble with the law is a fun, melodramatic acting moment—it really looks like she slaps him, too! I mean, she really gets in a good wallop!—Dee’s performance as a whole left me a little cold, her “naturalistic” line delivery coming across as overly calculated and her body language distractingly busy.

But at least Dee makes more of an impression than most of the supporting performers in this curiously flat crime epic, which works neither as a cop-vs.-crook battle-of-the-titans star vehicle for Crowe and Washington, nor as a GoodFellas-style evocation of a colourful, bygone criminal milieu. Too much time is devoted to tangents like Crowe’s custody battle for his son, and Washington’s performance seems like a miscalculation—I assume he and director Ridley Scott were hoping to show the paradox of a ruthless, amoral drug dealer who could also be extremely charming in his personal dealings, but they end up only sentimentalizing him. By the time I got to the film’s final image—a would-be “iconic” freeze-frame of Crowe and Washington, now middle-aged best buddies, cradling their takeout coffee as they cross a busy New York street—I no longer had any idea what Scott was trying to say with this film. Cops and criminals aren’t so different after all? Middle age erases all grudges? Everyone becomes legit if they stick around long enough? Thank God for the person who invented the cardboard coffee-cup sleeve?

RATING: 2/5




THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY

Plot in a Nutshell:
Julian Schnabel’s visually inventive adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir about life as a nearly completely paralyzed victim of “locked-in syndrome.”

Thoughts:
This is a really silly point to start off with, but why do reviewers always say that Jean-Dominique Bauby “blinked out” his memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? Since he could move only one of his eyelids, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that he winked it out? Or does that just make him sound too coy and flirtatious?

I don’t think Bauby would have taken offence at my observation—one of the best moments in Schnabel’s film comes when a pair of workers arrive in Bauby’s hospital room to install a speakerphone next to his bed. When they learn that he’s completely paralyzed, they ask Bauby’s therapist what use he could possible have for a phone, whereupon one of them remarks, “Maybe he’s a heavy breather!” The therapist angrily scolds them for their irreverence, but we hear Bauby chuckling to himself via voiceover, laughing from deep within his cavernous physical prison.

This light Gallic spirit helps distinguish The Diving Bell and the Butterfly from so many other disease-of-the-week movies—it’s less about the misery of Bauby’s condition than it is about Bauby’s ability to recall the sensual pleasures he enjoyed when he had command of his body, and to appreciate the small bits of colour and stimulation that exist even within the restricted world of his hospital: the red and white stripes of a nearby lighthouse; a new fur hat; the illustrations in an old copy of The Count of Monte Cristo; the beauty of his female therapists; the heartbreaking sound of his aging father’s voice over the telephone.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly seemed to strike a personal chord particularly with movie critics, who perhaps identified with the way so much of Bauby’s day consists of nothing but passive observation, and painstaking writing sessions. It’s easy to feel like little more than a disembodied eyeball when you’re a full-time movie critic, and it’s nice to see a movie that makes living life that way seem so brave and heroic.

RATING: 4/5