'The Lost City of Z' is a mesmerizing adventure
Modest and majestic at once, the films of James Gray patiently burrow their way into the souls of their characters and, maybe, into you. Gray is painterly and exacting some might say to a fault. But his movies' revelations are complex and contradictory - full of life's messiness - and their formal textures break open with moments of transcendence. So, yeah, I like them - particularly his last one, "The Immigrant," and his new one, "The Lost City of Z."
Romantic sense of exploration
Both are period films with a pulse and a nowness the genre often lacks. Each plunges us into the passages of early 20th century strivers and leaves us with a shattering final image of departure. Like the tide, they overwhelm and then recede. "He's been rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors," is how one character explains Percy Fawcett's predicament early in "The Lost City of Z," based on David Grann's nonfiction book. Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) is a British officer but decoration has eluded him, and his deceased, disgraced father has soiled his name.
Though craving action, he's assigned in 1906 on a map-making mission to the "blank spaces" of Bolivia where the British are meant to act as "referees" in a territory dispute with Brazil. The expedition into the Amazon jungles soon fills him with a romantic sense of exploration (his wife, Nina, played by Sienna Miller, reads him Kipling's "The Explorer"), and he travels across the Atlantic in search of glory and redemption. Success, he's told, would change his lot "considerably."
On the boat to South America, Fawcett meets his aide-de-camp, Henry Costin (an excellent, heavily bearded Robert Pattinson), who initially eyes his leader warily. "You might be a little too English for this jungle," he says as they step through flies and snakes. They and their small team travel up a river and it immediately feels as though "The Lost City of Z" has swum into the currents of Werner Herzog's "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" and "Fitzcarraldo" and Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now." The ominous notes are many: a glassy-eyed rubber baron (Franco Nero) whose business the British are there to protect; a native guide who warns that the river "is always danger"; the onset of hunger among the thinning crew.—AP