MATTHEW BOND
The Lost City Of Z is a film about the sporadically forgotten explorer Percy Fawcett, who was born in the Victorian era, became a hero of the First World War and, either side of that dreadful conflict, travelled to South America to do all sorts of dangerous exploring. If he didn’t actually wear a pith helmet, I suspect he probably should have done.
Fawcett’s story is a thoroughly British one and yet the film of that story has been made by three Americans. David Grann, a staff writer for The
New Yorker, wrote the book on which the film is based, Brad Pitt’s Plan B company produced it, and it has been directed and adapted for the screen by James Gray, hitherto best known – and indeed well-respected – for gritty New York dramas of the modern era. And, although I hate being culturally protectionist about this sort of thing, I suspect this is the problem.
From the early moment Fawcett gallops off on an Irish stag hunt looking more like a cowboy than an army officer, nothing comes remotely close to convincing. Time and again, I felt that this trio of no doubt well-intended, filmmaking Americans had simply got things wrong. Dialogue, characterisation, action… nothing hits the spot reliably enough for that vital suspension of disbelief. There’s no feeling of truth, no sense of reality on show here. But the Brits certainly can’t be exempted from blame. Charlie Hunnam, the English actor still perhaps best known for his early work on television in Queer As Folk and Nicholas Nickleby, seems horribly miscast in the central role of Fawcett and gives one of the oddest performances you’ll see all year. Notably lacking in charisma, Hunnam manages to turn Fawcett – a man who reportedly inspired the likes of Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle and, more recently, is said to provide the template for the character of Indiana Jones – into a humourless, self-centred know-all, convinced that he is right and everyone else wrong about there being an ancient lost city somewhere in the heart of the Amazonian jungle. But this is not the Eldorado of golden myth, this is Z, so named by him because it provides ‘the last piece of