![]() (Future “Spider-man” Tom Holland pivotally plays the eldest son, Jack). With every journey taking years, he’s a stranger to his children. More trips follow, as does World War I, but the tension that moves to the fore in “The Lost City of Z” is over the sacrifices necessitated by his dreams. It’s a huge step up for the magnetic Hunnam, who nevertheless struggles to find much but wide-eyed idealism behind Fawcett’s adventuring. The jungle becomes Fawcett’s compulsion, and, to the detriment of all else, he swells with ambition. He’s urged not to raise the stature of “the savage.” (Made a celebrity by his exploits, the Stetson-wearing Fawcett was a forerunner to Indiana Jones.) But his claim of a lost city and a civilization older than England’s is mocked. Upon his return to London, he’s hailed as a hero. Gray’s camera, too, stays composed, and he leads his epic in a more sprawling direction.įawcett believed that he found deep in the Amazon evidence of an ancient civilization. His grandiose notions aren’t humbled in the Amazon they’re elevated. “You might be a little too English for this jungle,” he says as they step through flies and snakes.īut while Fawcett’s journey is grueling and frightful, he finds not madness in the jungle but wonder. On the boat to South America, Fawcett meets his aide-de-camp, Henry Costin (an excellent, heavily bearded Robert Pattinson), who initially eyes his leader warily. Success, he’s told, would change his lot “considerably.” The expedition into the Amazon jungles soon fills him with a romantic sense of exploration (his wife, Nina, played by Sienna Miller, reads him Kipling’s “The Explorer”), and he travels across the Atlantic in search of glory and redemption. Though craving action, he’s assigned in 1906 on a map-making mission to the “blank spaces” of Bolivia, where the British are meant to act as “referees” in a territory dispute with Brazil. Edward Ashley, left, and Robert Pattinson in a scene from “The Lost City of Z.” (Courtesy of Amazon Studios/Bleecker Street) Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) is a British officer, but decoration has eluded him, and his deceased, disgraced father has soiled his name. “He’s been rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors,” is how one character explains Percy Fawcett’s predicament early in “The Lost City of Z,” based on David Grann’s nonfiction book. Like the tide, they overwhelm and then recede. Each plunges us into the passages of early 20th century strivers and leaves us with a shattering final image of departure. So, yeah, I like them – particularly his last one, “The Immigrant,” and his new one, “The Lost City of Z.” Both are period films with a pulse and a now-ness the genre often lacks. But his movies’ revelations are complex and contradictory – full of life’s messiness – and their formal textures break open with moments of transcendence. Gray is painterly and exacting – some might say to a fault. Modest and majestic at once, the films of James Gray patiently burrow their way into the souls of their characters and, maybe, into you.
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