+ Interview with Julian Schnabel, director of Before Night Falls
The Artist's Way
Adaptations of other materials for screen and on stage
too often lead to sins of omission, incongruous
additions, and unmet expectations for fans of the
source material. Adapted films can bring novels (or
plays, or whatever...) to life, but rarely have the
capacity to render a subject with as much detail and
depth as the source. In the case of Julian Schnabel's
adaptation of Reinaldo Arenas' memoir Before Night Falls, the possibilities and problems are multiplied,
because the source is not only the story of one man's
life, but also a complicated political history.
The book Before Night Falls is Cuban novelist and
poet Arenas' account of his life, first in Castro's
Cuba and then in exile, in the United States. Its
power is two-fold: it's an intoxicating, intensely
erotic account of sexual discovery and liberation, and
a devastating record of the artist's persecution under
the Castro regime. Arenas endured pursuit,
surveillance, and incarceration because he was a gay
man and a political dissident (not by his writings per
se, but by virtue of having manuscripts smuggled and
published abroad). In his memoir, Arenas recalls in
exacting detail his childhood full of sexual
curiosity, his adolescent rebellions, sexual
experiences and creative developments during his 20s,
and his torture and imprisonment as an adult. Arenas'
story seems almost too much to be lived by a single
man. When he finally left Cuba during the 1980 Mariel
Harbor boatlift, Arenas stopped briefly in Miami and
then moved to New York City, where he still lived in
near-poverty and before long, developed AIDS. He
committed suicide in 1990.
A faithful filmic adaptation of Arenas' memoir could
easily take six hours and still not capture the full
impact of the book. Painter-turned-director Julian
Schnabel (Basquiat) consciously diverges from the
traditional school of literary adaptation.
Impressionistic and elliptical, his film presents a
series of beautiful images rather than a strictly
coherent sequence of events. Arenas' childhood is
portrayed as fantastic flashes, much like a poet might
nostalgically remember it. Young Reinaldo plays naked
in the dirt as a crane shot pulls back quickly, to
show him as a child whose sense of connection with
nature will soon be threatened. Adult Arena's
(portrayed by Spanish actor Javier Bardem, from Jamon Jamon and Live Flesh) sexual explorations are
portrayed timidly at first, and his relationships with
a circle of friends read as platonic. Schnabel
portrays the freedom and pleasure of beach culture,
but only peripherally takes notice of the cruising and
promiscuity. Arenas estimates in his book that he had
5000 sexual partners by age 25; in the film, he has no
more than he could count on his fingers. (True, it
would be a very long film with 5000 trysts...)
Time passes with little reference, except occasional
intertitles. Arena's years in prison could be a month
or a decade. Schnabel's film doesn't convey a
particular history of revolutionary and
counter-revolutionary Cuba. A valid question, of
course, is whether the film could or should provide a
tutorial in 20th-century Cuban politics. Regardless of
whether such events are clearly chronicled, the film
does not emphasize, as the book does, the extreme
culture of fear and consistent betrayal among friends.
Instead, Schnabel opts for moments that make great
images and allows them to stand in for a story. For
example, in the most visually stunning sequence, one
man's crazy, failed attempt to flee Cuba in a hot air
balloon stands in for the entire nation's desperation
to leave the country.
Stunning images serve Schnabel well in showing the
inhumanity of solitary confinement in prison. The
camera barley moves while depicting Arenas cramped
into a small metal box with a dirt floor and smeared
with mud and, presumably, his own feces by the time he
is released. Daily prison life, however, appears as a
series of almost comic situations. Arenas becomes the
resident scribe in the jail, writing letters for the
other inmates. Upping the ante - and providing a touch
of fantasy in a grim setting -- Johnny Depp appears as
an impossibly glamorous drag queen named Bon Bon, who
helps smuggle Arena's manuscripts out of prison.
(Living out an Ed Wood fantasy, Depp is gorgeous.)
Surprisingly, it is not the prison period(s) of
Arenas' life but the final New York chapter that
Schnabel paints with of the harshest hues. The colors
have gone out of Arena's fantasies, and his poverty
makes his existence a continued struggle. (Even when
he was out of prison, some of Arenas' foreign
publishers held out on paying him royalties.) It is
also in New York that Bardem seems to most fully come
alive as Arenas: he is charming during a terrace
interview for a documentary, whereas, during earlier
sequences, the much-lauded Bardem plays Arenas with a
little too much reserve. Despite the importance of
featuring a native Spanish-speaking actor in the
central role, much of the dialogue and voice-over are
muddled in his thick accent, suggesting that a
subtitled film may have been more appropriate.
The effectiveness of the New York sequence has led me
to question whether this is influenced by Schnabel's
own experience with 1980s New York (the setting of
Basquiat and his own painterly superstardom) or the
more sudden development of narrative form. The
question ties in with the
more fundamental crisis I experienced in seeing the
film: a division between appreciation for its visual
beauty (it was shot by Xavier Perez Grobet and
Guillermo Rosas), and disappointment that so many of
the facts were missing from the screen. Certainly,
Before Night Falls is not a "faithful" adaptation on
the level of storytelling (too many of Arenas' life
has been eliminated) or factual documenting (the film
does not present a discernable history). Schnabel
collaborated on the script with Cunningham O'Keefe and
Lazaro Gomez Carriles (the guardian of Arenas' estate,
saintishly portrayed in the film by Olivier Martinez).
And, as reported in a New York Times interview with
Schnabel, the script progressed from very detailed to
broader and more impressionistic, including snippets
of Arenas' creative writing. The result is a
sumptuous, dreamy film that only touches reality in
its ravaging final moments. Schnabel's choice not to
present a more thorough portrait of Arenas' passions
for men and desperate suffering under Castro, however,
seems to miss so much of Arenas' memoir that it does
not give the book its due.
