New Zealand Rehabilitation Association, Inc.

I don't know about you, but I'm terrible to accompany to any movie where there is even a suggestion of rehabilitation occurring. I tend to ruin it for everybody. Part of the problem is that most of the time the clinicians involved are patronising, disinterested or just plain absent. For instance, I truly loathed the last quarter of Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby (2004). Maggie, the boxer from the wrong side of the tracks, gets decked in a Big Fight and winds up in hospital with high-level quadriplegia. The movie ends up grappling with the morality of euthanasia, with Eastwood's character, Frankie, in emotion contortions over whether or not to grant Maggie her request to be shot like a dog. All the while I'm half standing on my seat in the theatre yelling "no wonder she's depressed - someone get that poor woman a tilt-in-space wheelchair and access to the Internet!" I mean to say, Maggie is so badly abandoned by her health professionals that she develops serious pressure sores while staring at the ceiling to the point where the docs have to amputate her leg! Me on my chair in the theatre again, gesticulating wildly: "What kinds of monkeys are running this hospital!"

Likewise, because I'm on a rant, I also hated the much celebrated Breaking the Waves (1996). Danish oil-rig worker Jan gets clonked in the head with a metal pulley and find himself in hospital, paralysed, depressed, and without a health professional in sight. Sure I know it's all just plot device, but when I saw him dragging himself across the floor in an attempt to do himself in, all I can think is: look at that fantastic arm function! How come nobody's working on that?

Which all leads me to a movie I liked - the point of this review: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007). This movie is based on the memoir of Jean-Dominique Bauby, past Editor of the fashion magazine, Elle, who at the age of 42 suffered a massive stroke that left him with no movement except in his left eye and no capacity for speech. Bauby had survived a stroke with what is known as ‘locked-in syndrome' - the kind of disorder that you learn about as an undergraduate health professional but never actually see in clinical practice because it is so rare. Guided by a speech-language therapist, Bauby learns to communicate by listening to the alphabet (spoken in order of most commonly to least commonly used letters) and blinking when he hears each letter of the word he wants to spell. In this way, Bauby writes his book. Apparently this took about 200,000 blinks to write and an average word took approximately two minutes. In 1997, Le scaphandre et le papillon (aka. The Butterfly and the Diving Bell) became a best-seller across Europe.

But this movie isn't really about all that. It isn't a movie where we the audience marvel at the 'bravery' of a man exceeding expectations. Maybe it's about what would happen if one was given the opportunity (or perhaps punishment) to reflect uninterrupted on one's lifetime of decisions. Maybe it's about what's at the heart of true relationships (with one's parents, with one's friends, with strangers one meets) when all the usual trappings of everyday existence have been stripped away. Whatever it is, this movie is about more than just 'overcoming disability'.

So, to the rehabilitation in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - I felt no need to comment for a change. I loved the health professionals in this movie. Sure they made errors: they were a little over-bearing at times, they got too emotionally involved in Bauby life, they had no sense of humour around his disability as he did - but at least they were there! They did something! They took risks with initiatives, they were attentive, they were perpetually, annoyingly optimistic, and they cared. For once, I sat through a movie with a bit of rehabilitation in the hinterland and felt no compulsion to comment.