The Lost City of Z
Directed by: James Gray
Written by: James Gray - Based on the book by David Grann
Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, Sienna Miller, Tom Holland, Edward Ashley, Angus Macfadyen, Ian McDiarmid, Clive Francis, Harry Melling
Action/Adventure/Biography - 140 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 18 Apr 2017
Written by: James Gray - Based on the book by David Grann
Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, Sienna Miller, Tom Holland, Edward Ashley, Angus Macfadyen, Ian McDiarmid, Clive Francis, Harry Melling
Action/Adventure/Biography - 140 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 18 Apr 2017
To define The Lost City of Z as ‘based on a true story’ is to employ the phrase's broadest and most liberal interpretations. As much as the film is based on a non-fiction work by David Grann, there is an equal and just as vocal camp who declare our hero a racist cad prone to sensationalism and doused in ignorance. However, to review only the film rather than the historical record, writer/director James Gray appears to have entered his Fitzcarraldo phase. In attempting what many a director before him has tried, an authentic jungle experience emphasizing the depravity and environmental torture, The Lost of City of Z is a bore.
Watching adventure-mad, upper crust Europeans try and discover and tame the untamable is nothing new in exploration cinema. The most famous variation of the genre is Apocalypse Now and most recently, the excellent Oscar-nominated Colombian film Embrace of the Serpent charted the course of determined colonialists to find an elusive flower. Enduring Major Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam, Crimson Peak) and his over-pronunciation of the word Amazonia may only be compared to these previous films at its peril. The Fawcett on screen is earnest, self-confident, and obsessed to prove his suspicion there once was an advanced civilization deep in the Amazon. Do a simple Google search to enlighten yourself as to what the real life Fawcett was like.
Watching adventure-mad, upper crust Europeans try and discover and tame the untamable is nothing new in exploration cinema. The most famous variation of the genre is Apocalypse Now and most recently, the excellent Oscar-nominated Colombian film Embrace of the Serpent charted the course of determined colonialists to find an elusive flower. Enduring Major Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam, Crimson Peak) and his over-pronunciation of the word Amazonia may only be compared to these previous films at its peril. The Fawcett on screen is earnest, self-confident, and obsessed to prove his suspicion there once was an advanced civilization deep in the Amazon. Do a simple Google search to enlighten yourself as to what the real life Fawcett was like.
We first meet Fawcett in early 20th-century posted by the British Empire in Ireland and are assured of his physical prowess and firearms skill as he bags the elk in the officer’s hunting league. This accomplishment and future advancement are both muted as his superior exquisitely explains to the General, “He has been rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors.” When the Royal Geographical Society comes courting and offers Fawcett the opportunity to survey and demarcate the vague border between Bolivia and Brazil, Fawcett agrees at the promise to clear his family name. It’s all so Top Gun; recall when Maverick was just Duke Mitchell’s kid?
I’ve never been to the bowels of South America nor have I rafted upriver there; however, according to James Gray, Percy Fawcett experienced everything one would expect to see in a Wikipedia article on the Amazon’s most stereotypical three-hour tour. There is a nasty robber baron enslaving the local native population while he funds a full-on opera in the middle of the jungle. To dodge the spear-throwing natives one must either duck and cover or jump into the water with the piranhas. There are cannibal tribes with burnt human corpses on a spit and heads lined up on pikes, and all-knowing shamen at one with the forest can create any concoction to accomplish any feat. The 12 year-olds in the audience will love it if they can stay awake for the full two and a half hours.
Left behind are Percy’s wife, Nina (Sienna Miller, Live by Night), and an ever-expanding catalogue of children he never sees. Percy Fawcett appears to impregnate his wife every time he stops by for a year in between absences and then sees the offspring three years later just in time to create more little Percys he will never get to know. When one’s ambition is to show those mocking elitists at the Royal Geographical Society that they are merely drunken racists and the savages are in fact capable of managing formal agrarian societies, then it does not leave one much leisure time to throw the ball around with the boy.
Gray does not fashion Percy Fawcett into a white savior. There are no scenes of Fawcett doing anything to help the natives from their robber baron oppressors; he’s just there for the sights. Differing from the historical record, Fawcett remarks to his aide de camp Henry Costin (Robert Pattinson, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2), “We’ve been so arrogant and presumptuous.” Percy knows there is more to the ‘savages’ than bows and arrows and cannibalism. However, these assertions go nowhere as Gray leaves far too much time for pointless melodrama. Angus Macfadyen as the pompous and grotesque James Murray who joins in on an expedition chews up so much scenery I can visually understand why his weight bogs down the journey.
For the second film in a row after The Immigrant (2013), Gray gets down into the mud again to show the human struggle. Gray says he explores “the dynamics of the family” in his films and while this is a Lost City of Z sub-plot, it was far more pronounced in his earlier police films like We Own the Night (2007) and in his screenplay for Blood Ties (2013). Shot by the veteran, Oscar-nominated cinematographer Darius Khondji (Magic in the Moonlight), The Lost City of Z goes predictably green in the jungle and washed out back in cloudy England and the diseased trenches of World War I France. Gray strove for authenticity filming in the Colombian rainforest, even on 35mm film, a truly admirable feat in the jungle, but The Lost City of Z exhibits an inauthentic protagonist and comes off as a chore to watch rather than the intriguing adventure/biography it should be.
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