RUN THROUGH THE JUNGLE
‘Lost City of Z’ an epic Amazon adventure.
“The Lost City of Z” is a throwback, an epic film about a grand adventure. If it doesn’t always quite reach the majestic heights to which it aspires, particularly with its narrative, the mere attempt is engrossing. James Gray (“We Own the Night,” “The Immigrant”) goes for broke in his story of the real-life English explorer Col. Percival Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), who begins the film as a nondescript military officer at the beginning of the 20th century and ends it as a man obsessed with finding a lost city in the Amazon he thinks he brushed up against on his first expedition.
He didn’t set out to be an explorer. A fine horseman and a good shot with a rifle, he dreams of being a decorated officer. As things stand, he complains to his wife Nina (Sienna Miller), he hasn’t earned a single medal.
He’s sent to the Amazon to map out a border, in hopes of preventing a war that would be disastrous to the rubber trade, and as a good colonialist, the crown certainly can’t have that.
Fawcett grudgingly accepts. These were not short tours of duty — such an expedition would take years, he’s told. But he has little choice, and if he’s successful not only will it bring him a measure of fame, it will restore his family name. (Evidently his father was a drinker.)
Soon (though not soon enough — the film drags at the beginning) he’s heading down the river into the jungle, accompanied by the loyal Henry Costin (Robert Pattinson, barely recognizable and outstanding).
Here is where Gray really begins to shine. He immerses us in the wilderness right along with the explorers. Certainly there are suggestions of other films, like “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” or, as we wait expectantly for something bad to happen as the soldiers journey down the river, “Apocalypse Now.” But Gray’s eye is his own. We learn quickly enough of the dangers such a trip involves.
Once they find the source of the river, Fawcett also finds shards of pottery and other artifacts that lead him to believe that there was once a city here, deep in the jungle. It’s heresy to the staid Empire, the notion that these “savages” could have created a civilization first. (There’s evidence the real-life Fawcett was not as enlightened as the film makes him out to be.)
In a terrific scene, after Fawcett returns he gives a speech to the Royal Geographic Society in which he makes his claims and is shouted down, in the most genial British way imaginable, by doubters. He will return to the jungle, he declares (and Costin agrees to accompany him) and prove them all wrong.
Thus is born an obsession. In another good scene Nina insists that she should accompany Fawcett on his next expedition, arguing that she is as qualified and fit as anyone. He won’t hear of it, of course, but Miller, who is excellent, makes it clear that Nina’s right.
No such luck, however. It’s back to the Amazon for Fawcett. He will also lead men in battle, finally, when World War I breaks out. But his heart is in the jungle. Eventually the rest of him will be too, along with his oldest son Jack (Tom Holland), for whom the trip is a salve on the wounds of abandonment he’s felt over the years.
Gray expertly shows the massiveness of these undertakings — the years of effort, the sacrifice and the sheer arrogance of man trying to tame nature — and also the spirit of adventure required of someone who knows nature can’t be tamed but can’t stop trying.
Reach film critic Bill Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Twitter: @goodyk.