Papillon Review

DVD Review
Papillon (1973): A Film by Franklin J. Schaffner

"Papillon" is a true story which, I have no doubt, has been given the Hollywood treatment, scandalized and hyperbolized. It is the supposed, without meaning offense, true story of Henri "Papillon" Charriere (Steve McQueen), a man wrongfully imprisoned for a murder he did not commit. He befriends, or more specifically, bargains with Louis Dega (Dustin Hoffman) in order to become friends. Papillon agrees to serve as a bodyguard to Dega while in prison, as Dega has become rich off of counterfeiting government war bonds and is a prime target for the other prisoners to kill, beat, or rape in order to take the money he is smuggling into the penal colony. In return, Dega will help Papillon fund his escape from the penal colony.

The story progresses, as one could expect, into the two becoming close friends whose mutual care help each other survive in conditions that would turn men into animals. After Papillon is placed in solitary confinement for a botched first escape attempt, Dega bribes a guard to place half a coconut shell into Papillon's water bowl for extra sustinence. Food rations are so scarce that the prisoners result to stealing from dead bodies, which I suspect is not the worst deed that some of the inmates have uptaken.

But, alas, frustration sets in for the audience. What we believe is the final escape attempt takes places at a most opportune time. Audience fatigue is beginning to set in, and it is believed the weariness and exhaustion of earlier, stress-inducing scenes will be relieved by a much-deserved (for the audience and for the prisoners) escape. The escape is botched, once again, and the film continues for another half-hour to forty-five minutes. Asking to cut a half hour from an already two hour and thirty minute film is not much, in my opinion. Enough of that.

The film also suffers from problems with tone; at times the film seems to want to be a buddy comedy, at other moments the film becomes heavy-handed and drawn out. Near the end of the film, in what is a strange scene indeed, Papillon arrives (I will not explain how) at a village with natives; the males are wearing next to nothing, the females even less so. Body and face paint and tribal weapons adorn their bodies. Papillon has what is assumed to be a sexual relationship with one of the female villagers, paints a butterfly on the tribal leader's chest, and one morning he wakes up and they have departed. I did not understand the significance of the scene, but I certainly hope it has one. The scene disrupted the flow of the movie, the tone, the wonderful gritty realism of prison escape drama. Not a word of dialogue is spoken for what must be at least ten or fifteen minutes in the scene with the natives. Ah, but I make a big deal out of time. "Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in," as Henry David Thoreau once wrote.

The film is ultimately satisfying, although it takes many lengthy detours to get there. The emotional fufillment between Dega and Papillon at the end of the film is ultimately less than stellar, but we must also consider the circumstances and reasoning that their relationship was founded upon. Individual scenes, such as the haunting sequences of Papillon's solitary confinement, are superb. Thus, the most fitting description for "Papillon," I suppose, would be that the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Rating: 3/4 stars