The Lost City of Z

 James Gray (2017)

An article by the Canadian explorer John Hemming has just appeared on the Spectator website with the heading, ‘The Lost City of Z is a very long way from a true story – and I should know’.  The sub-heading reads:  ‘A new Hollywood film hypes Percy Fawcett as a great explorer.  In fact, he was a racist incompetent who achieved very little’.  The piece makes clear the liberties that James Gray’s film takes with the facts of Fawcett’s life, especially the details of his several expeditions to find an ancient lost Amazonian city, which Fawcett believed to have been inhabited by a civilisation exceptionally advanced for its time.  On the last of these expeditions, in 1925, Fawcett, by then approaching sixty, was accompanied by his elder son, Jack; both disappeared without trace.  John Hemming concludes that the fundamental problem is David Grann’s 2009 book The Lost City of Z, the primary source of James Gray’s script:  ‘… Grann hyped the story out of all proportion and wrongly depicted Fawcett as a great explorer  … Hollywood believed everything Grann wrote, and then hyped it up more’.   It’s amazing to a viewer like me who’d never heard of Percy Fawcett that what’s been put on screen is an artificially colourful treatment of its subject.  Gray’s picture seems conscientious and is formidably boring.

Until 1906, when he first travelled to South America, Percy Fawcett was a career soldier and, according to the film, a somewhat thwarted one.  The opening scenes of The Lost City of Z – set in 1905 in Cork, where the protagonist is currently stationed – are mildly promising.  On a dynamically-filmed deer hunt, it’s Major Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) who shoots and kills the quarry yet he’s virtually shunned at the hunt ball that takes place that evening.  When one elderly chap (David Calder) asks another (a surprisingly cast Murray Melvin) why the deerslayer isn’t on the top table, the answer is that Fawcett ‘made a rather unfortunate choice of ancestors’.  The early conversations between Percy and his wife Nina (Sienna Miller) convey her keen frustration that her husband hasn’t received what she considers his military just deserts.  But the Irish prologue also supplies hints that a more generic kind of life-story-telling is in the offing.  After three-year-old Jack (Tom Mulheron) has witnessed his father’s triumph in the hunt, Percy tells his excited infant son, with biopic clairvoyance, ‘One day, you and I will hunt together …’   When they eventually go to the Amazon, they themselves become the prey of hunters.  Jack (now Tom Holland: the intervening seven-year-old boy is played, in a brief appearance, by Billy Smalldridge) fears they’re about to be killed by native ‘savages’ but Percy tells him calmly that, ‘Whatever happens is our destiny’.  That kind of remark in this kind of film is always meant to be totally reassuring, though I’m not sure why.

Fawcett first goes to South America on a frontier-surveying assignment on behalf of the Royal Geographical Society, the RGS having been commissioned by the Bolivian government to act as an impartial third party in mapping an area on the border of Brazil and Bolivia, at what John Hemming calls ‘the height of the great Amazon rubber boom’.  At this point, Fawcett enters uncharted territory within the Bolivian jungle and James Gray familiar terrain for a based-on-a-true-adventure-story narrative:  the ‘dramatic’ incidents and conflicts between characters that follow are just what you’d expect.  The film stays put in this terrain for the next two hours – except for the odd aberrant sequence, such as an exchange between Fawcett and an almost hysterically animated RGS audience, to which he first makes public his belief in Z.   The hero interrupts his exploring to resume soldiering, during the Great War; the trench warfare scenes have the perfunctory quality of an interlude.  Two other, related things lend the film a kind of distinctiveness:  Gray accentuates the negative more than a mainstream Hollywood director of yesteryear would likely have done, and Charlie Hunnam’s performance in the lead makes Fawcett appear dutifully dogged rather than flamboyantly obsessive in his quest.  I guess it’s the combination of predictability and earnestness that has led some admirers of The Lost City of Z to describe it as ‘classical’ big-picture cinema à la David Lean.  It was a combination of the last letter of the alphabet and wishful thinking that Gray’s film might get entertaining which kept linking Fawcett’s lost city in my mind with the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz.

Charlie Hunnam’s facial expressions are occasionally expressive; vocally, he’s not only colourless but always sounds like an actor reading lines – usually with forced elocution.  He is, and looks, younger than Fawcett was even in 1905 although Hunnam’s aging make-up is good.  Twenty-year-old Tom Holland is actually the right age to play Jack Fawcett (who was twenty-two when he accompanied his father on the last, doomed expedition) but he’s weirdly more effective as an adolescent – as an adult, his voice sounds barely to have broken.  Robert Pattinson, though he sometimes looks to be trying to hide behind a large beard, manages to get a bit of individuality into the part of Fawcett’s long-standing aide-de-camp.   Clive Francis and Ian McDiarmid do well as RGS bigwigs.  The Amazonian jungle is no place for a woman, of course.  This is a pity, because Sienna Miller’s acting is freer and more communicative than anyone else’s, even though the loyal-wife-cum-feisty-woman-ahead-of-her time role she’s playing is weakly contrived.

28 March 2017