Reeling by Pauline Kael

Author:Pauline Kael [Kael, Pauline]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Published: 1976-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

Solemnity is a crippling disease that strikes moviemakers when they’re on top: a few big hits and they hire Dalton Trumbo and go into their indomitable-spirit-of-man lockstep. Papillon, the most expensive movie of the year, is a thirteen-and-a-half-million-dollar monument to the eternal desire of moviemakers to win awards and impress people. How can you play around and try out ideas on a property like the Henri Charrière best-seller, which probably cost a couple of million to start with, and with stars (Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman) who definitely cost three and a quarter million between them? It would be like juggling with the Elgin Marbles. What should have been an entertaining escape-from–Devil’s Island thriller, with some laughs, some suspense, and some colorful cutthroats and likable thieves, has been treated not as if it were an escape story but as if it were the escape story. The story has become practically abstract, and for much of the time the movie can’t be bothered telling us where Papillon (Steve McQueen) is escaping from or where he hopes to go. The moviemakers have approached the subject of Papillon (a French safecracker who was sentenced to prison for life for killing a pimp and who, thirty-odd years after he broke out, trumped up his adventures into a best-seller about his many escape attempts) as if they were making an important historical biography — about a pope, at the very least.

The stark ad showing McQueen and Hoffman sweating in their chains seems to be looking for a caption: “What do you mean, what am I doing here? What are you doing here?” It’s understandable that, at a cost of two million, Steve McQueen can become an icon to moviemakers, but to put him in a role that requires an intense audience identification with the hero’s humanity — the sort of role Jean Gabin played in La Grande Illusion and Pépé le Moko — is madness. McQueen is an amusing actor of considerable skill but a reserved actor whose expressive resources are very small. That’s what’s fun about him: when he’s placed in tense situations, his tiny, tiny shades of expression become a witty caricature of the American man of action’s emotionlessness. If ever there was a wrong actor for a man of great spirit, it’s McQueen; as Robert Mitchum once remarked, “Steve doesn’t bring too much to the party.”

Actually, no actor could have saved this unrelievedly grim picture — not with the Trumbo–Lorenza Semple, Jr., script, which keeps Papillon shackled and penned up (Trumbo has only one arrow to his bow, and he shot it in The Fixer), and not with Franklin J. Schaffner, late of Nicholas and Alexandra, directing. Schaffner has a clean, precise camera style for spectacle (The War Lord, Planet of the Apes, Patton), but there’s no spectacle in Papillon; there are a few scenes involving lots of extras but no large-scale action. A director such as John Boorman (Deliverance), with his hypnotic talent for charging an atmosphere with

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