Review: "The Lost City of Z"

GRAY, James (Dir.), “The Lost City of Z”, Mica Entertainment/Northern Ireland Screen/Plan B Entertainment/Keep Your Head/Madriver Pictures/Sierra Pictures, 2016.

The story of Percy Fawcett’s mad dash to the Matto Grosso in the Amazon Basin is a classic tale of adventure and exploration. Ernest Hemingway used to carry a copy of the book with him and referred to it as one of the greatest adventure tales of all time, even moreso because it is all true. It was only a matter of time therefore, that someone would turn it into a movie. If only it hadn’t been these people.

My first exposure to Percy Fawcett (outside of some sparse gaming material) was through a book entitled Brazilian Adventure written in the 1930s by Peter Fleming. It recounts the efforts of the author, along with some mates, to try and retrace the footsteps of Percy Fawcett’s last expedition along the Amazon and possibly solve the mystery of his disappearance. Despite a lot of serious difficulties, it reads a lot like something that P.G. Wodehouse might take a swing at – like Bertie Wooster goes to Brazil. However, in the background of that narrative is the looming spectre of Fawcett and the quest upon which he was bent. Inevitably, I moved on to another book – Exploration Fawcett: Journey to the Lost City of Z – which is the account of all Fawcett’s travels in South America, edited by his youngest son Brian.

Like Hemingway says, this is a mighty work, detailing years of painstaking exploration and mapping across the Amazon River Basin. It’s unflinching in its portrayals of the discomfort and the sheer back-breaking work of travelling through the region and is full of many bizarre and wonderful encounters, from eccentric murderers and landholders, to meetings with ghosts. (I posted a review about this book several years ago now, so if you want to know more, you can back-track.) You could say that any section of the work would contain enough material to keep the average script-writer, or movie director, occupied for a lifetime; however, this movie actually spends very little time in the jungle.

This treatment of Percy Fawcett focuses almost exclusively on Fawcett’s relationship with the society back home in England. We see him struggling in the army to win recognition for his efforts; we see him being passed over for various favours from the aristocracy, due to the circumstances of his birth (his father disgraced himself rather badly and placed his family beyond the pale); and we see him being handed an onerous job by the Royal Geographic Society that would see him sent out of the country and which no-one else thought was ‘exciting’ enough to consider taking on. This, of course, was the Bolivian mapping expedition which introduced Fawcett to South America and which set him on course for his mysterious disappearance.

All of this is interesting background, but it plays rather too strongly throughout the film. Various incidents where the ‘Old Boys’ Network’ prevents Fawcett from making any kind of headway take place and these are as outrageous as they are unfair, as you’d expect. They serve to underscore the desire that Fawcett must have felt to leave so-called “civilisation” behind and get back to where the ability to succeed depended upon a range of entirely different skills, not dependent upon who you were, or how well you could stab someone in the back. As it is, this celluloid Fawcett is rather un-fazed by all the bickering back home: he seems far more interested in hoofing through the jungle than looking after either his career or his family. When at home, he appears little more than mildly irritated and bored.

The jungle scenes themselves are somewhat lacking in anything that would serve to promote any notion of there actually being a Lost City somewhere out there. The motley crew find a pile of broken potsherds and a face carved into a tree; Fawcett sees a bunch of… skulls? Carved heads? It’s not clear, but then he has to turn back and temporarily abandon the quest. Throughout Fawcett’s writings, there were encounters with natives and traders who told him about the City and other clues that reinforced the possibility that something was out there somewhere; here, there’s very little of any merit to convince anyone, let alone the viewer.

A major feature of Fawcett’s travels was his desire to treat the local indigenes well and to learn things from them. The encounters with the natives shown here are colourful but they often don’t serve to push the narrative ahead. We have moments where Fawcett disappears into the Bush with a group of bow-wielding Indians, then he returns moments later with free access to the village, food and supplies and a new compass heading. The sense is that the natives are merely a colourful background before which the explorers move without impinging upon in any significant way.

Muscularly-faced Charlie Hunnam is a good pick to play Fawcett physically, but it feels like he’s tired all the way through the movie; Robert Pattinson – almost unrecognisable beneath layers of beard and spectacles – is sulky and world-weary as Fawcett’s right-hand man; and Tom Holland – while barely in the film at all – is distracting behind his moustache (I kept thinking, “Spidey has a lip-fairy!”). Added to this, Sienna Miller, as Fawcett’s wife, is completely wasted. In fact, most of the scenes in which she appears feel tacked-on and pointless: her constant cavilling to be treated as her husband’s equal feel like they are intentionally timely, homilies drawn from our current zeitgeist rather than the circumstances of the source material. I don’t want to take anything from the #MeToo movement (of which I approve), but this comes off almost as a paid advertisement for it, more irritating than the most blatant product placement in a blockbuster.

Political hedging aside, this film feels as though it’s treading a line, following links between narrative points in Fawcett’s life and desperately trying to miss nothing. However, all of the episodes it so painstakingly screens are the bits that took place in England, and very little of what took place in Amazonia, arguably the bits that are described by Fawcett in his own words and which are far more interesting than stuffy period piece club rooms, society galas and aristocratic get-togethers. Add to this, the fact that the film kind of tapers off at the point where Fawcett pere et fil vanish into the jungle, borne away by natives, the whole thing just comes across as fuzzy and poorly focussed. In short, this is a bloodless re-telling of beside-the-point facts, deliberately missing all the really interesting parts of Fawcett’s life in favour of painting a “Downton Abbey”-esque backdrop to it. I was left wondering what Werner Herzog could have done with it?

Three Tentacled Horrors from me.