brutal and sometimes surreal force to be warily
respected, rather than some bright, romantic
pulp-fiction playground. The Amazon rainforest
is a “green desert” where any passing non-
indigenous human is little more than a walking
buffet for mosquitoes, piranha, jaguars and
cannibals. It is a powerful and visceral portrayal
of a truly unmerciful landscape.
Though Major Percy Fawcett is no wild-eyed
Aguirre. Known to his contemporaries as “the
David Livingstone of the Amazon”, and an
inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The
Lost World, he was one of the last great British
explorers — a man who, until he himself became
as lost as the city he sought, kept his composure
and dignity amid the heat, starvation and
occasional deluge of tribal arrows. In Gray’s
script (adapted from The New Yorker writer
David Grann’s superbly illuminating history) this
fascinating character comes with the added
baggage of social ostracism; “He’s been rather
unfortunate in his choice of ancestors,” one
snooty superior notes. So success as an explorer
is not merely a question of satisfying his intrepid
nature; as Fawcett says to his boozy aide-de-
camp Costin (Robert Pattinson, hidden beneath
specs and a bushy beard), “My reputation as a
man rests entirely on our success.”
In casting the role, Gray has taken something
of a gamble. Charlie Hunnam’s broad-
shouldered, laddish swagger seems an odd fit for
the rake-thin, ramrod-straight gentlemanexplorer, who we follow through two decades of
life. And while Hunnam largely holds up well
under the pressure of his most demanding role
yet, he is a less compelling presence during the
quieter scenes with Fawcett’s ahead-of-her-time
wife Nina (Miller, underused in yet another
sidelined-spouse role) and, later, his grown-up
son Jack (Holland). He is a man for hacking at
the tangled undergrowth or, in a dramatic
mid-film diversion, scrambling across the barbed-
wire and chlorine-gas plagued no-man’s land of
the Somme.
Which isn’t to place the blame for the
film’s lapses in momentum squarely at
Hunnam’s door. Gray’s three-act/three-
expedition structure necessitates in-between-
adventure stretches which, while highlighting
Fawcett’s listlessness and impatience to get back
to finding Z, may also test your own patience a
little and make the 141-minute running time feel
significantly longer.
It’s a difficult story to end, too, its appeal to
Grann being its status as one of modern history’s
great unsolved mysteries. But here Gray excels,
going out on an oblique but elegant note that is
somehow simultaneously unnerving and sublime.
DAN JOLINHAVING SPENT MUCH of his career
channelling the grit and glower of ’70s crime
cinema (see: Little Odessa, The Yards and We
Own The Night), it’s no surprise to find that
James Gray’s latest movie just as faithfully echoes
the same era — albeit in a very different way. In
The Lost City Of Z he takes us far from the
Scorsese-esque mean streets of the East Coast
and drops us deep into the verdant, even meaner
murk of a Herzogian wilderness.
Aguirre, The Wrath Of God is the obvious
touchpoint, with its own doomed quest to find a
jungle-swallowed city. As in Herzog’s unsettling
1972 epic, Gray’s shadowy jungle is an amoral,
THE LOST CITY OF Z
DIRECTOR James Gray
CAST Charlie Hunnam, Sienna Miller, Robert
Pattinson, Tom Holland, Angus Macfadyen
PLOT While on a 1906 expedition, explorer Percy
Harrison Fawcett (Hunnam) finds what he believes
to be evidence of a lost civilisation. Unearthing
this Amazonian El Dorado — ‘Z’ — becomes
his obsession and, he believes, his destiny.
OUT 24 AUGUST
RATED M / 141 MINS
HHHHH
VERDICT Solid and stately, a ’70s-feeling jungle
adventure film that’s more of a thought-
provoker than an excitement-inducer. But
there’s nothing wrong with that.