Charlie Hunnam mesmerizes as adventurer in ‘Lost City of Z’
In “The Lost City of Z,” a lush, melancholic story of discovery and mystery, a mesmerizing Charlie Hunnam plays a British adventurer in the Amazon who is consumed by “all the glories of exploration,” as Joseph Conrad once wrote of a different journey.
Enveloped by the forest, the explorer and his crew face snakes, piranhas, insects and that most terrifying of threats: other people, who at times bombard the strangers with arrows. Undaunted, he perseveres, venturing more deeply into a world that first becomes a passion and then something of a private hallucination.
In “The Lost City of Z,” writer-director James Gray has set out to make a film in the colonial era that suggests the likes of David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” but through a sensitive, contemporary lens.
The story that Gray has chosen seems an unlikely candidate for such revisionism because it turns on Lt. Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett, who came to believe in the existence of a lost Amazonian civilization. He called it the lost city of Z; others called it El Dorado, a European illusion that proved catastrophic for the New World.
The movie opens shortly before Fawcett is approached by the Royal Geographical Society to map uncharted territory in Bolivia. A career soldier and son of a disgraced aristocrat, Fawcett is anxious to change his fortunes and increase his social standing.
Leaving behind, rather too easily, his loving wife, Nina (Sienna Miller, wonderful), and their young son (later played by Tom Holland), he sets off and is soon struggling through the Amazon with a small crew that includes an aidede-camp, Henry Costin (an excellent Robert Pattinson, shaggy and almost unrecognizable).
Deep in a jungle, where each wonder is matched by terror, Fawcett is ravaged — and then transformed — by his discoveries of both a new world and another self.
In time, native people emerge, by turns watchful, threatening and welcoming.
When his expedition comes under siege at one point, he orders his men not to fire and instead waves a kerchief while calling out “Amigo!” It’s a stratagem, but Fawcett’s curiosity is boundless and he sees accomplishment and complexity in this world, which sharply goes against bigoted orthodoxies back home.
Gray, working from David Grann’s 2009 book, “The Lost City of Z,” glosses over Fawcett’s more noxious beliefs. Grann, for one, writes that Fawcett “escaped virtually every kind of pathology in the jungle, but he could not rid himself of the pernicious disease of race.”
Gray doesn’t soften all of these uncomfortable edges — there is arrogance and tinges of cruelty in this portrait — but he’s far more interested in what seems to have distinguished Fawcett, namely his passionate belief that Amazonian Indians were not the primitives the West insisted they were.
That passion sends Fawcett back to the Amazon several more times over the years, eventually becoming a kind of steadily devouring fever.
Fawcett finds ecstasy in and out of the Amazon, as does Gray, who fills the screen with intimate reveries and overwhelming spectacle, including a harrowing interlude during World War I. Until now, Gray has tended to work on a somewhat modest scale, often with art films that play with genre. Here, he effortlessly expands his reach as he moves across time and continents and in the process turns the past into a singular life.