British explorer’s tale a spellbinding drama
“The English go native very easily,” explorer Percy Fawcett once wrote, speaking on behalf of himself, T.E. Lawrence and an entire sociological and literary tradition steeped in the sun never setting on the British Empire. “There is no disgrace in it. On the contrary, in my opinion it shows a creditable regard for the real things in life.”
Throughout the 20th century and, stubbornly, into the 21st, the movies have banked on stories about men of pallor entering the realm (and often redrawing the maps) of people of color. Taking on such a story today, a director enters the ring with a variety of epics past, from “The African Queen” to “Lawrence of Arabia.” The remarkable achievement of “The Lost City of Z,” from writer-director James Gray, isn’t that it equals or bests those pictures; it’s not trying to do that.
Rather, Gray strives for a chamber epic honoring classical 20th-century filmmaking and narrative conventions, but with his own sense of dramatic investment and an often spellbinding calm. Gray, whose previous film, the lovely 2013 drama “The Immigrant,” honed his eye for telling period detail, would look foolish if he favored too much ironic distance regarding his subject. Even worse, a director might be tempted to embrace the old jungle exploration cliches uncritically. Gray steers a compelling middle course. This is a really good film. It just isn’t the traditionally rousing one many will expect and the trailers promise.
Gray adapts David Grann’s 2009 nonfiction account, which was expanded from a New Yorker magazine feature on one of the strangest missingpersons cases in early 20thcentury history. Born in 1867, Percy Harrison Fawcett headed several expeditions between 1906 and 1925 to what was then known as “Amazonia.”
Deep into uncharted jungle territory along the border between Bolivia and Brazil, he and his men first surveyed and mapped the area for the purposes of capitalism, i.e., the rubber trade. The dangers were extreme: disease, tribal attacks, piranhas. Death lay around each new bend of the river, as the Victorianand Edwardian-era serials might’ve put it.
But Fawcett was after something more elusive. Inspired by rumors, legends and some stray accounts of an ancient civilization hidden away from the rest of the world, Fawcett left his progressive suffragette wife and his sons behind, cyclically, to search for — what? El Dorado? A mythical kingdom? Or simply the remains of a civilization proving to his fellow Brits, the stuffed shirts down at the Royal Geographical Society, that world progress was more complicated than the Empire’s version of events?
Gray begins “The Lost City of Z” in Ireland in 1905. Fawcett, played with steady resolve and commanding charisma (up to a point) by Charlie Hunnam, has been “rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors,” as one military superior puts it. He knows he’ll forever be looked down upon by his fellow officers, owing to being born out of wedlock. Sienna Miller portrays Nina, his wife, and while she’s confined to the sidelines throughout much of Gray’s picture, she takes a gratifyingly fuller share of the action as the story moves into the post-World War I era. (The scenes of Fawcett surviving trench warfare are brief but extremely vivid, and they’re a crucial part of Fawcett’s life.)
Fawcett’s loyal assistant in his explorations is a composite character, based on several people, played by Robert Pattinson. The writing and the playing in this role is rather bland; there are times, too, when Gray’s decision to elide or remove the more extreme fragments of Fawcett’s personality goes too far. But working with the terrific Iranian-born cinematographer Darius Khondji (“Seven,” “The Immigrant”) and shooting on 35 mm film instead of digitally, Gray follows Fawcett’s story through one scary or beautiful or troubling development after another, in locales that feel new, in part, because they’re not picture-perfect gorgeous every second.
Plenty of fictionalizing aspects can be found. Fawcett, in the movie, embarks on three major expeditions; in truth, he made several more than that. Where it counts, “The Lost City of Z” has the patience to deal with how a man such as Fawcett would affect, in day-to-day terms, everyone in his family, including his explorer son, played by Tom Holland.
It took me a long time to warm up to Gray’s filmmaking. It makes the truest aesthetic sense to me the further back his stories are set. In “The Immigrant,” he treated the Ellis Island experience and Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the early 20th century with a modest budget but a marvelous eye to go with his humane storytelling instincts.
In “The Lost City of Z,” the budget’s bigger, and the project took him to Colombia, as well as Belfast and London. All the same the film feels life-sized, even if Hunnam, at times, relies on heroic movie poses rather than a fully fleshed-out dramatic investigation of a character. The movie may not be quite nervy enough for its subject. Then again, Werner Herzog already made “Aguirre, the Wrath of God.” Film by film, Gray is becoming a truer, more effective version of the filmmaker inside him. In the stunning final shot, involving a mirror image and a trick of the eye, the writer-director of “The Lost City of Z” reminds us that we’re all searching for something, or someone. Even if we don’t get in the boat going up river.