Papillon

Papillon, a Steve McQueen film from 1973, holds a certain place of importance in my movie-going life. It is one of the first films I saw that was expressly not for children, and thus I felt like a grown-up going to see it. I remember attending a show at the old Calvin Theater on Michigan Avenue in Dearborn with my friend Andy, and we were dazzled by all sorts of things we never saw in kiddie flicks: a beheading, lepers, bare-breasted native girls, references to the anal cavity, intimations of homosexuality, and a man eating bugs. We loved it.

I hadn't seen this film since its initial release until last night, and while it is an admirable film, and McQueen may have given the best performance of his career in it, I'm left wanting. There's something missing at the heart of the story, and it's tough to put my finger on what. Perhaps by the end of this review I'll have figured it out.

Papillon is based on a memoir (or was it fiction?) by Henri Charriere, who got his nickname by the butterfly tattoo on his chest. He is a petty criminal who was convicted of murder (he claimed he was framed) and sentenced to the notorious French penal colony on Guiana. He befriends a fellow convict, a bookish counterfeiter played by Dustin Hoffman. They have a mutually beneficial relationship--Hoffman has a lot of money (kept in a canister shoved where the sun don't shine), which he will use to underwrite McQueen's escape attempt, while McQueen will protect Hoffman from the other prisoners.

McQueen escapes once, briefly, for which he is imprisoned in solitary for two years. Hoffman arranges for him to receive coconuts, but when this is discovered McQueen is told to inform on who supplied them or suffer half-rations and a darkened cell for six months. He refuses to comply, and it is during this harrowing sequence that McQueen is most impressive. In so many films McQueen is known for his cool, but here he lets it all go. He really makes you feel what it's like to be incarcerated in such a dehumanizing way, and the makeup effects combined with his performance are chilling.

McQueen again escapes, this time with Hoffman, and they encounter a leper colony. They make it to Honduras, but again are captured, and in the film's last scenes the two old friends are reunited on Devil's Island, where McQueen is told that "the tides and sharks serve as guards." The prisoners live fairly autonomously, and Hoffman is completely beaten, happy to tend his garden and pigs. McQueen, though, is never dissuaded from trying to escape, and studies the waves, figuring out a system that will take him to freedom.

As an adventure film, Papillon works very well. The director is Franklin J. Schaffner, and he paints a big canvas, well using the lush jungle settings. But yet, there is something missing. Perhaps it's in the central character. We meet him as he is loaded on the boat to South America, so we get no sense of him as a non-prisoner. We only know him as a man who refuses to stop attempting to regain his freedom. In this way he is sort of a stand-in for humanity in general, and this is a burden the character and the film just can't carry. Perhaps the film would have been more successful had it dialed down and settled for being an adventure without the over-arching themes.

Some of this film works beautifully, though. The last twenty or so minutes, with McQueen and Hoffman reuniting on Devil's Island, both of them battered by years of imprisonment, are poignant, and when they hug goodbye the emotions are ripe.

Papillon is a good film, missing greatness by just a bit.