Add Category
Posted
Percy Fawcett was an early 20th century British surveyor who made several expeditions into the Amazon, the first on behest of the Bolivian and Brazilian governments to map their common border.
American writer-director James Gray's epic adventure The Lost City of Z imagines him in a more heroic dimension, following his search for a ruined city he believed lay somewhere in the humid gloom of the rainforest.
It's a story with all the ingredients of a grand, late colonial adventure: a journey down a treacherous river with cannibals who shoot arrows from its densely foliaged banks, trips back to Europe to lobby for support, and the all too fleeting reunions with wife and children.
Gray, who is one of America's most sophisticated directors, transforms these potentially rough hewn clichés into something inspired.
Throughout his career, in films as diverse as The Immigrant and The Yards, he's proved an insightful observer of the struggle for material wealth and its intersection with status and reputation.
In The Lost City of Z, the British class system comes into focus, with Fawcett an ambitious servant of the crown seeking to climb the ladder.
English actor Charlie Hunnam's blue eyes and golden hair are almost the embodiment of dull perfection, but he's an inspired choice for Fawcett — a military man whose hard-wired correctness threatens to short-circuit under the strains of repeated expeditions.
Fawcett's obsession borders on madness, but it's something that neither his wife (Sienna Miller) or his bespectacled, bearded wingman (Robert Pattinson) is able to talk him out of.
Miller and Pattinson acquit themselves well as Fawcett's biggest supporters and most useful critics, but the driving force of the story is not the marriage or the bromance — it's Gray's fascination with the perplexing, obsessive psychology of his hero.
Fawcett is driven by a desperate quest to rehabilitate his family name, tarnished by a gambling, alcoholic father, and his desire to set an example of manhood for his own sons. It's a quest, the film seems to suggest, as noble as it is unattainable.
Critics of The Lost City of Z — Canadian explorer and Amazonian expert John Hemming is the most high-profile — claim that Fawcett was a mediocre explorer and racist.
The film depicts him as the opposite. He speaks of an epiphany after meeting an Amazonian tribe that makes him realise all humans are made "from the same clay".
Gray then places ethnographic photographs of young Amazonian men alongside a shot of Fawcett's very English-looking son — the two images echoing each other's humanity — and the point is eloquently made.
This progressive Fawcett might be historically inaccurate, but it doesn't make the film a hollow monument to a figure that history now condemns.
The Lost City of Z is a reflection on an interior world more than an exterior one. It articulates what it feels like to live in the crease of time between the past and the present — where the future, or one's hope for it, is an escape from tradition and scandal.
Gray presents Fawcett as a victim of the English class system who takes his chances to find glory abroad, and if that idea speaks of colonial hubris, the film doesn't buy into it.
Fawcett, if anything, appears like a precursor of a modern-day explorer who champions indigenous culture against the racists in the wood-panelled hall at the Royal Geographical Society.
This may be rewriting history, but when you take the film on its own terms, it's a nuanced, thrilling portrait of a man fighting convention and prejudice.
Gray's hero comes up against a myriad of forces that seek to undermine him. Some are in the jungle, many of them are in London.
Topics: biography-film, film-movies, arts-and-entertainment, brazil, bolivia