SYBIL

Sybil is a famous, Emmy award winning film starring Sally Field as Sybil, a real women possessed by 16 different personalities. This movie remains as a superbly acted, one-of-a-kind achievement that has yet to be surpassed as the definitive cinematic treatment on multiple personality disorder.

Sybil started life as a 1974 bestseller by Flora Rheta Schreiber, an absorbing account of the pseudonymous Sybil’s struggles with multiple personality disorder and the 11 years psychiatric treatment that helped to integrate her sixteen personalities into one. The book’s authenticity has been called into questions in recent years, but the real “Sybil”, the late Shirley Ardell Mason, insisted up to her death in 1998 that every word in the book was true.

In any event, I’d probably like the movie adaptation better if it were more faithful to Schreiber’s account. Primary among my whinge is the final integration of Sybil’s many selves, in the book a long setback filled process that the movie compress into a single afternoon in a park. This makes it difficult to elaborate the treatment considered in the movie as it was pretty brief and incomplete.

I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to call this as the finest movie I’ve seen, and probably the best possible interpretation of this material. In some ways it even improves on the book, most notably in the performances of Joanne Woodward as Sybil’s committed shrink and Brad Davis as her confused boyfriend; in contrast to their literary counterparts, who came off as little more than personality-free ciphers orbiting around Sybil, both actors create fully-rounded, compelling characters.  And, that leaves Sally Field as Sybil. This is certainly one of the best works she has ever done; her frequent changes in character, from the mousy Sybil to the more refined Vicky, the assertive Mary Lou, or little girl Sybil Ann, are totally convincing.