The Lost City of Z (15.)
Directed by James Gray.
Starring Charlie Hunnan, Robert Pattinson, Sienna Miller, Tom Holland, Edward Ashley and Angus Macfadyen. 140 mins.
The Lost City of Z is a film I had half a mind to give a miss. The notion of sending the precious, delicate flower of our thespian youth off on a turn of the last century expedition to the Amazonian jungle seemed an enterprise fraught with potential disaster. Him out of Twilight, the new boy Spider-man and, even the Son of Anarchy who turned down Fifty Shades, just didn't seem robust enough for the task ahead, doomed to perish in some vainglorious calamity, like fresh faced, perfect skinned Captain Scotts and Oakes. This expedition though is an unexpected triumph. It manages to do something that the movies almost never do: it tells a based-on-a-true story like it might actually be true.
I suspect that this is going to be a real opinion divider and it is important for potential viewers to realise that despite the pulpy title that looks like it should be preface by “Tarzan And,” this is not an adventure romp, or even a tale of foolhardy derring do gone wrong. Rather it is a biopic of the explorer Percy Fawcett. In the mid 1900s, he was an accomplished soldier who found his career blocked because he had, “been rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors,” and so finds himself drafted onto a vaguely suicidal Royal Geographical Society mapping expedition to mark out the border between Bolivia and Brazil. There he finds an obsession there that will cause him to be apart from his wife (Miller) and family for many years.
The film benefits from some strong performances, especially Hunnan in the lead role. He has Daniel Craig intensity, but is always softly spoken. (Possibly too much so – he's taken the idea that leader don't raise their voices to extremes.) The budget means Grey has to be sparring with his jungle vistas but he makes the most of what he has. Occasionally though the editing is a bit abrupt: sometimes we'll find ourselves in a sequence that hasn't properly been set up. Also the film is vague about the specifics of the expeditions – one minute they'll all be travelling along the river on a raft and the next it will be revealed that they have a horse and you wonder where that was being hidden.
The film really has a strong, distinctive take on the British officer class sense of duty and sacrifice. We have come accustomed to these stories of historical jungle exploration being chaotic Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski fuelled descents into madness. This is a tale of a destructive obsession, but calm, measured, destructive obsession. It's terribly British like that. (The film looks like it was a very ordered production, without any Apocalypse Now style frittering away of the budget.) The film hero worships Fawcett but the careful, balanced way it presents his pursuit, the thoroughly considerate and reasonable way he heads for disaster, reveals much more about the mindset and drives that built the empire than a stiff upper lip caricature could. The film is like a Ripping Yarns played straight and very poignantly.
The American director Gray also wrote the script (its adapted from from a book by David Grann) and has done so with some bravery. Confronted with a narrative that sprawls over two decades (1905 to the mid 1920s), is episodic, has few major defining events, few neat narrative arcs and where the motivation of the characters is often tough for modern audience to grasp, it doesn't flinch or scamper away to the haven of artistic license, the last refuge of a scoundrel. Instead, it faces them all down head on and tries to deal with its subject honourably and faithfully. And overall he succeeds, creating a film that is the mirror of its subject: bold, striking, spiritual, full of integrity and is perhaps touched with a certain noble futility.
Directed by James Gray.
Starring Charlie Hunnan, Robert Pattinson, Sienna Miller, Tom Holland, Edward Ashley and Angus Macfadyen. 140 mins.
The Lost City of Z is a film I had half a mind to give a miss. The notion of sending the precious, delicate flower of our thespian youth off on a turn of the last century expedition to the Amazonian jungle seemed an enterprise fraught with potential disaster. Him out of Twilight, the new boy Spider-man and, even the Son of Anarchy who turned down Fifty Shades, just didn't seem robust enough for the task ahead, doomed to perish in some vainglorious calamity, like fresh faced, perfect skinned Captain Scotts and Oakes. This expedition though is an unexpected triumph. It manages to do something that the movies almost never do: it tells a based-on-a-true story like it might actually be true.
I suspect that this is going to be a real opinion divider and it is important for potential viewers to realise that despite the pulpy title that looks like it should be preface by “Tarzan And,” this is not an adventure romp, or even a tale of foolhardy derring do gone wrong. Rather it is a biopic of the explorer Percy Fawcett. In the mid 1900s, he was an accomplished soldier who found his career blocked because he had, “been rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors,” and so finds himself drafted onto a vaguely suicidal Royal Geographical Society mapping expedition to mark out the border between Bolivia and Brazil. There he finds an obsession there that will cause him to be apart from his wife (Miller) and family for many years.
The film benefits from some strong performances, especially Hunnan in the lead role. He has Daniel Craig intensity, but is always softly spoken. (Possibly too much so – he's taken the idea that leader don't raise their voices to extremes.) The budget means Grey has to be sparring with his jungle vistas but he makes the most of what he has. Occasionally though the editing is a bit abrupt: sometimes we'll find ourselves in a sequence that hasn't properly been set up. Also the film is vague about the specifics of the expeditions – one minute they'll all be travelling along the river on a raft and the next it will be revealed that they have a horse and you wonder where that was being hidden.
The film really has a strong, distinctive take on the British officer class sense of duty and sacrifice. We have come accustomed to these stories of historical jungle exploration being chaotic Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski fuelled descents into madness. This is a tale of a destructive obsession, but calm, measured, destructive obsession. It's terribly British like that. (The film looks like it was a very ordered production, without any Apocalypse Now style frittering away of the budget.) The film hero worships Fawcett but the careful, balanced way it presents his pursuit, the thoroughly considerate and reasonable way he heads for disaster, reveals much more about the mindset and drives that built the empire than a stiff upper lip caricature could. The film is like a Ripping Yarns played straight and very poignantly.
The American director Gray also wrote the script (its adapted from from a book by David Grann) and has done so with some bravery. Confronted with a narrative that sprawls over two decades (1905 to the mid 1920s), is episodic, has few major defining events, few neat narrative arcs and where the motivation of the characters is often tough for modern audience to grasp, it doesn't flinch or scamper away to the haven of artistic license, the last refuge of a scoundrel. Instead, it faces them all down head on and tries to deal with its subject honourably and faithfully. And overall he succeeds, creating a film that is the mirror of its subject: bold, striking, spiritual, full of integrity and is perhaps touched with a certain noble futility.
