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. The colors have gone out of Arena's fantasies, and his poverty makes his existence a continued struggle. 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.