Papillon (2017)

A remake of the 1973 Steve McQueen vehicle, itself drawn from Henri Charrière's autobiography, a document whose truthfulness has been disputed for decades. Michael Noer directs with grim, workmanlike resolve. Devil's Island is rendered as mud, rain, and casual brutality, and Charlie Hunnam suffers handsomely in the lead. Rami Malek, as the counterfeiter Louis Dega, blinks through the humidity with the air of a man who has read the script and found it damp.

The inventory of contemporary social markers comes up nearly empty, and this is not a failure of nerve so much as a failure of interest. The cast is a wall of white European men. Malek's presence as a Marseilles criminal is the lone gesture toward a wider world, and the film never once remarks upon it. Women appear chiefly as Nenette, an alibi with a face and a few lines. There are no queer themes, no racial reckoning, no climate anxiety, no economic critique of the state institution doing the imprisoning. The body here is punished, not celebrated. The film's attitude toward flesh is that of a man holding a rock.

A feigned madness surfaces in the second act, but it is a ruse for reaching the infirmary, not a portrait of a mind that works differently. The closing postscript tallies the eighty thousand condemned and the bestseller's twenty-one weeks at number one, a mild tug at the sleeve and nothing more. What we have is two hours of drowning, whipping, and solitary confinement, capped by a coconut raft. It is a sturdy, unfashionable object, and it knows precisely what it is. No sermon. Just rain.