The Lost City of Z Resuscitates Cinema’s Classic Adventure Tale – The New Yorker

Robert Pattinson and Charlie Hunnam in James Grays new film.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY AIDAN MONAGHAN / BLEECKER STREET MEDIA / EVERETT

James Grays films are the public trace of a secret doctrine: dont follow the words, follow the music; dont believe your eyes, believe your heart. Hes a devoted, meticulous, fanatical realist whose clear, tough, physical dramas sublimate themselves into undertones and overtones, murmurs and intimations, reminiscences and dreams. His new film is The Lost City of Z, which is based on the nonfiction book by David Grann, aNew Yorkerstaff writer, chronicling an early-twentieth-century British explorers ill-fated expedition in the Amazon jungle. The film opens today, and with its bluff, romantic resuscitation of the cinemas classic adventure-tale genre and tone, its perhaps Grays most radical attempt at abstraction and displacement.

Its the story of a search thatits no spoiler to saydoesnt come to fruition, a series of missions that dont achieve their goals, and that nonetheless reverberate powerfully and enduringly with the force of its ideas and ideals. The action starts in 1905, when Major Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), serving to maintain British rule in Ireland, is summoned to London for a meeting. Though Percy (so Ill call him, to distinguish the character from the historical person) is brave and capable, hes the son of a dissolute father, and his lineage impedes his promotion both in the Army and in society. That may change, thoughhes dispatched by the Royal Geographical Society to lead an expedition into the Amazonian jungle bordering Bolivia and Brazil so that, by mapping the vague border, war between those countries can be avoided (and British economic interests can be served).

Percy and his second-in-command, Henry Costin (Robert Pattinson), a more experienced explorer, discover the missions dangers and difficulties early on, as well as its mysterious wonderssuch as the discovery of an opera company maintained in a rustic encampment run by a local rubber baron. The potentate supports the mission with the full force of his harsh reignhe offers Percy a crew of enslaved indigenous people, as well as rafts and other supplies.

The heat proves overwhelming; Henry has a cut that wont heal; the Amazon teems with fish that the explorers never manage to catch; a crew member mutinies; natives on shore attack the river-borne company with arrows; and the mission threatens to deteriorate into a merely onerous duty when an Indian slave (on whose knowledge of the terrain Percy depends, and whom, its worth noting, Percy treats respectfully, like a crew member) confides to Percy that theres an ancient city in the jungle, somewhere past the source of the river. Sure enough, when they arrive at the sourcea land that no Caucasian has previously reachedPercy finds shards of pottery, as well as elaborate tree carvings, that indicate vestiges of the lost city. Though the British government has cancelled the original purpose of the mission and Percy and his crew return to London, Percy is now possessed of a new purposeto return to the jungle and find that city, which he dubs Z (pronouncing it zed, British-style).

Percys purpose isnt mainly archeologicalits anthropological. He wants to overcome Eurocentric bigotry and prove that the indigenous people of the Amazon jungle, derided by other Geographical Society members as savages, display an intellectual and cultural sophistication equal toand earlier thanthat of European society. He undertakes a second missionand it proves to be even more difficult than the first, but it also brings him into close contact with one native tribe thatwhile practicing cannibalism (albeit in a way thats explained so as to minimize its horrors)also displays an intricate civilization, as well as remarkable agricultural achievements. Yet this mission, too, is thwarted; Percy returns home unsatisfied. With the Great War now under way, hes sent to lead troops into battle and, suffering a chlorine-gas attack by German forces, is rescued from the battlefield, hospitalized, and warned by doctors that his exploring days are done. (As it so happens, theyre notand the final mission proves to be catastrophic.)

Theres a surprising lightness to the scenes of the rigorous, dangerous expeditions, and that lightness is a crucial aspect of Grays artistry. He doesnt minimize the hardships endured or the exertions requiredbut he approaches them with a modesty and a self-restraint thats as much a matter of ethics as of aesthetics. From a personal perspective, filming to emphasize the difficulties and displeasures of the mission could only come off (as it does, for instance, in Werner Herzogs films and in Apocalypse Now) as vanity, as a breast-beating boast of the difficulties that he himself endured (and to which he subjected his cast and crew) in order to make his filmas if that pride and that proclamation should win him any badge of honor over and above the specific merits of the film itself.

Proceeding by touches, symbols, and synecdoches, by suggestions and implications, Grays modesty conveys, above all, an absencethe incommensurable abyss between the experience and the image, the realm of the unfilmable, or, rather, the no-longer-filmable. Grays films vibrate with echoes of what his experiences, his ideas, his feelings could be, cinematicallyif the classical cinema that inspired them and nourished them were still in existence. It isnt only grand adventure that, in Grays artistic purview, cant be filmed with a classical fullnessits life itself. The Yards gathers the sounds and moods and tones of growing up in Queens, the experience of Gray watching classic movies and imagining his own experiences, his own emotions, embodied in those styles, knowing that they never could be. In Two Lovers, he conjures the sense of feeling simultaneously like an emotional titan trapped in a tiny apartment in a narrow life and like an emotionally stunted, damaged, unworldly-incapable monsterand does so within the constraint of a narrow, local cinematic style that reverberates nonetheless with the force of grand-scale classic melodramas. The Immigrant catches a family prehistory of grand passions that coincides with the operatic grandeur of the silent cinema; its a story of the furious struggles of an earlier generation that implanted Grays own immigrant family into America and implanted movies into Hollywood.

Theres a music to Grays films, a music to his images; hes essentially incapable of making a dull or untextured image, but, just like the term style, the word music is itself value-free. What kind of music do his images make? A poised, neoclassical music; Grays images have an untimely, exalted quietness, as if he were filming with violins and woodwinds and didnt admit of electric instruments, though his subtler textures compete in the same arena and catch some of the same emotional jolt. In Lost City, glancesas between Percy and his wife, Nina (Sienna Miller), his intellectual associate and companion in his mission (but who isnt allowed to accompany him physically into the jungle)fill instants with vast swaths of time. They reverberate with an extraordinarily inward intimacy, in which action doesnt seem to imply thought so much as it seems to accumulate around it.

Ive seen The Lost City of Z twice, and on first viewing I wished that the role of Major Percy Fawcett had been filled by its original claimant, Brad Pitt, whose element of ferocity and possession is his most distinguishing trait. On second viewing, though, I found Hunnams more moderate incarnation true to the movies sense of Fawcetts own obsession: Percy isnt an obsessive by nature, hes an obsessivemalgr lui. He didnt choose to explore the Amazonian jungle, he was sent there to fulfill a mission that was neither of his choosing nor of his preference (he wanted to see combat). He fulfilled his mission dutifully, found his sense of purpose inflamed by the ideaand the slender evidenceof the lost city, and his desire to find it is fuelled by an intense humanistic rationalism.

Percys devotion to discovering the Lost City of Z doesnt dance with exotic visions of golden towers but treads with an unusual yet pedestrian sense of decencyhe seeks not its glory but its workaday complexity, less El Dorado than an Amazonian Manchester. Hes looking to rediscover the traces of a vanished society in the hope of overturning facile hierarchies and replacing them with respect, honor, and wonder at the achievements of distant peoples in the distant pasta society that, for all its cruelty and ferocity, embodies secrets and experiences that are lost to modernity. (Like The Immigrant, The Lost City of Z features one of the greatest last shots in the recent cinemaand this one captures those contradictions with a majestically imaginative gesture.) The mission involves chaos, turmoil, troublebut Percys vision, his efforts, and his reports are models of poise, purpose, and precision. Grays subject is the pursuit of a truer, better self, one thats imbued with and inspired by the colossal achievements of the past, a self-accomplishment thats distinguished from the petty rounds of daily negotiations and drawing-room squabbles. As alluring as the fleeting fragments of inspiration may be, theyre subordinate to the purpose of the great, big, perfected, enduringand impossiblework. In Grays filmsas in the drama of The Lost City of Z itselfthe true creation is neither the effort nor the result: its the purity of the emotion and the clarity of the idea.

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The Lost City of Z Resuscitates Cinema's Classic Adventure Tale - The New Yorker