The Lost City of Z ** (2016, Charlie Hunnam, Sienna Miller, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson) – Movie Review

Director James Gray’s biopic of British explorer Colonel Percival Fawcett is conscientious but terminally boring. Gray is a good director – Little Odessa (1994), The Yards (2000), We Own the Night (2007) – but this does not seem like the right material for him at all.

This true-life drama makes an unwieldy film, with a ‘and-then’, ‘and-then’, and-then’ narrative as Fawcett keeps nipping over from the UK to the South American jungles and back in his obsessive searching for a mysterious city in the Amazon in the 1900s, 1910s and 1920s, a search interrupted by his brave service in World War One. The first section of the film is particularly boring, with a long introduction from the days of Fawcett’s military career. It does improve and perk up a bit with his first map-making expedition to the border of Bolivia and Brazil in 1906. And it does finally get on track just before it finishes with his final expedition. This last sequence shows the kind of movie it could have been.

[Spoiler alert] Fawcett mysteriously disappeared along with bis son Jack (Tom Holland) on his final exploration in 1925, but this film attempts some kind of possibly fanciful explanation and resolution to the story to give the film some kind of conclusion.

Sienna Miller struggles aimlessly in an ungrateful role as Fawcett’s regularly abandoned, long-suffering wife Nina (they seem to see each other just long enough for her to have another baby), Holland (looking daft in a fake moustache) can’t make anything of his whingeing role, Angus Macfadyen can’t do much with trouble-making rival explorer James Murray, Franco Nero has nothing part as Baron de Gondoriz and ditto Harry Melling as William Barclay.

But these actors’ problems are nothing compared with those faced by poor Robert Pattinson, hardly there at all, hidden behind a ridiculous beard, as Fawcett’s travel pal Henry Costin. These roles are so underwritten that it would defy any actor.

That more or less leaves only Charlie Hunnam as Fawcett, in a huge star role that is the whole show. It was once intended for Brad Pitt, who now just produces for his Plan B company. It would have been ideal for Pitt in his younger days, but he is way too old now. So hiring Hunnam was the right idea.

Hunnam dangerously underplays, talking in the quietest of posh English tones, even shouting quietly, but is good, quite good, maybe very good. When he punches his teenage son in the face for disrespecting him, it is a properly shocking moment. It might have been interesting to see Pattinson in the Fawcett. He is a good actor and could have pulled it off. But Hunnam earns his place in the star role. He is the film’s sole saving grace.

Gray’s screenplay is based on the book The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann. You can buy the book on Amazon – only kidding! Actually you can buy it on Amazon, for just over a tenner.

When I saw it at London’s Cineworld Leicester Square cinema, Darius Khondji’s cinematography looked terrible in the darkest possible light and colours, so there was a constant strain to see it. And the sound quality was appalling, so there was a constant strain to hear the admittedly modest dialogue. Ironically, this cinema used to be, until very recently, the Empire. It was, by the way, a brilliant cinema. The cinema manager said the problem was possibly the ‘materials’ he had been sent.

Anyone who seen them will be unable to keep the classic Werner Herzog movies Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) or Fitzcarraldo (1982) out of their heads during The Lost City of Z.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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