Tough guys tough it out in Papillon (again!)
If you watch, as I recently did, the 1973 film “Papillon” back to back with the remake, you get a double dose of prisoner abuse and appealing actors pantomiming a range of human misery. Blood is spilled, bodies are ravaged. Both movies are sober, high-minded stories about the terrible things that men do to other men in the name of country and righteousness. Mostly, these are chronicles of extreme male suffering, torments so ghastly they turn otherwise ordinary men into quasireligious martyrs.
To what end? The most obvious reason is that the first film is based on a bestseller, and the second is, well, based on the first. Each draws from a disputed memoir by Henri Charrière, a French criminal who was sentenced to life for a murder he said he didn’t commit. In 1933, he was shipped to French Guiana, a speck on the Atlantic coast of South America. The French claimed it in the 17th century, using it as a slave port and later a penal colony. Its most notorious section was a former leper settlement called Devil’s Island, where the wrongly accused spy Alfred Dreyfus was imprisoned.
Charrière may have been less innocent than Dreyfus; at the least, he seems to have been harshly judged. But much like the original, the remake of “Papillon” isn’t interested in questions of innocence and guilt or jurisprudence. Instead, it’s about tough men toughing it out in tough conditions while laughing — or stoically staring or occasionally
trembling — in the face of death. The grim reaper has taken up permanent residence here, and is emblematized by a looming guillotine and personified by the guards, the dandified warden and the corpses that are hauled off like sacks of garbage.
The original movie is sometimes erroneously called a classic; it isn’t — it’s just old. If it’s remembered fondly now, it’s probably because of its television replays and its nicely paired leads, Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. Both were major stars at the time, and the film was a hit. Written by Dalton Trumbo and
Lorenzo Semple Jr., and directed by Franklin Schaffner, it is overlong and at times silly but has those two magnetic stars and flashes of absurdity that temper the interminable barbarism.
The remake stars Charlie Hunnam as Henri and Rami Malek as Louis Dega, Henri’s fussy, wealthy sidekick. Malek isn’t the brilliant technician and ace scene-stealer that Hoffman is, so there isn’t much for him to do but squint through thick eyeglasses and look aghast at the inhumanity of it all. Because the new movie, like the original, is primarily a buddy picture, Malek also spends
a lot of time looking at the more persuasive Hunnam. It’s understandable. An appealing performer who holds your attention with both his beauty and lowwattage charisma, Hunnam offers some much-needed relief from the pervasive grimness.
Hunnam isn’t yet a movie star, and given current industry trends (big-studio cartoons, superhero flicks, etc.) might never get that chance. His talent is for quiet, unshowy moments, not leading-man grand gestures and important speeches. He has put in a lot of hard work in “Papillon,” most conspicuously in an extended passage during which Henri languishes — and nearly goes mad — in solitary confinement. As the years pass, Henri grows more ragged and haunted looking, and Hunnam grows alarmingly thin and then thinner, shedding weight in the name of authenticity when good acting should have sufficed.
Losing a lot of weight (or packing it on) — Hunnam shed 40 pounds — is the kind of thing that some actors like to do, but it’s often a needless stunt. “Rami and I aggressively starved ourselves,” Hunnam is quoted as saying in the movie’s promotional materials. It’s too bad that they didn’t have a better director who instead could have figured out cinematically how to convey Henri’s agonies during his confinement. Working from a script by Aaron Guzikowski, director Michael Noer generally puts the camera where it should go and adds a sterile Parisian interlude but nothing much else of note.
Charrière, who was pardoned, died in 1973, just months before the first “Papillon” opened, immortalizing him. What’s most striking about his story now, at least in its big-screen iterations, is how the abuse reads as a standin for the barbarity of colonialism. There’s a suggestion of Catholicism in the spectacle of tormented male flesh, of course. But as Henri and the rest of the predominantly white prisoners are tortured and murdered, it is hard not to see their suffering as a form of white self-aggrandizement and a way of erasing the crimes committed against both the Indigenous inhabitants and enslaved Africans.