A textbook example of a director prizing himself over his material, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly finds its true story about paralyzed Elle France editor Jean-Dominique Bauby hopelessly smudged with artist-turned-filmmaker Julian Schnabel's fingerprints. In December 1995, 43-year-old playboy Bauby suffered a severe stroke that left him completely paralyzed but fully cognitive, a condition known as "locked-in syndrome" in which he could communicate only through blinks of his sole functioning eye. Despite this tremendous disability, Bauby—with the help of his devoted speech therapist Henriette (Marie-Josée Croze) and patient writing partner Claude (Anne Consigny)—managed to dictate, one letter at a time, a slender volume of reflections on his circumstances and regrets before dying in 1997, a book which Schnabel and writer Ronald Harwood adapt with only slightly more restraint than that shown by competitive gorger Kobayashi at Nathan's annual hot dog-eating contest.