Misery runs deep in remake of ‘Papillon’
No movie is immune from receiving a flashy Hollywood remake, not even a hoary old beast like the 1973 prison-escape classic “Papillon.”
And that’s as it should be. Many movies more beloved than “Papillon” have been remade with success. The best ones find clever ways to update, and even improve upon, stories that were good to begin with. Perhaps that’s what puts this new “Papillon” at an immediate disadvantage. The words “Based on a true story” can impart gravity and drama, but they can also box filmmakers into a corner. How do you inject new life into a story based on a literal biography, cemented in
place and time by recorded history?
Backstory adds some texture to this retelling. Here we meet Henri “Papillon” Charrière in early 1930s Paris, all pinstripes and romance with a girl on his arm and pilfered diamonds in his pocket. Charlie Hunnam plays the tattooed
safecracker with an excess of charisma that persists even when he lands a oneway ticket to a French penal colony. Our time in this deliciously period Paris is regrettably brief, only enough to give us a glimpse of Papillon as a free man, but not quite enough to lament his imprisonment.
Ever the grifter survivalist, Papillon quickly finds his project behind bars: Louis Dega (Rami Malek), a nebbish, bespectacled counterfeiter not wired for prison life, and whose wealth makes him a mark. Papillon, a gruff-enough man to sport a butterfly tattoo on his chest without fear, offers Dega his protection in exchange for financing his eventual escape. After a particularly harrowing encounter, Dega has no choice but to accept.
A “Papillon” remake lives or dies on these two performances, made famous by Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. Hunnam and Malek acquit themselves finely, neither trying to imitate his predecessor. Malek plays Dega straight, without the Coke-bottle myopia and squirrely affectations that Hoffman brought to the screen, and Hunnam’s rakish stubbornness makes him a natural fit in a prison drama. These characters feel lived in, and over the long, tortuous years, an uneasy alliance transforms into a lifelong friendship that sustains the two men.
Despite that enduring friendship, “Papillon” is not a celebration of the human spirit. This is a story of brute, animal endurance, survival in all its ugly necessity. It is mud and blood and feces. It is mutilation and rape. It is money hidden in painful orifices. It is years of maddening solitary confinement. It is two-plus hours of relentless misery with no triumphant swell, agony bending two men as far as they can go without quite breaking them.
Which brings us back to central question: Why remake “Papillon”? What creative shot across the bow makes this story feel not just fresh, but essential? The new film never quite satisfies that question. What we see onscreen instead is mere competence, handsomely shot but bereft of purpose. One gets the sense that it was remade for no other reason than because more tolerant 21st-century content standards mean you can spill a man’s guts onscreen.