The Lost City of Z

As recount­ed by David Grann in his devourable 2009 non-fic­tion best­seller, the sto­ry of Colonel Per­cy Har­ri­son Faw­cett is one of the great unsolved mys­ter­ies in the annals of explo­ration. Sin­gle-mind­ed in his pur­suit of an elu­sive ​“lost” civil­i­sa­tion, and at odds with con­tem­po­rary sci­en­tif­ic rea­son­ing, Faw­cett led a three-man team deep into unchart­ed Ama­zon ter­ri­to­ry before dis­ap­pear­ing with­out a trace in 1925.

Grann frames the sto­ry as a mys­tery, posi­tion­ing him­self as the lat­est in a long line of what today’s Roy­al Geo­graph­ic Soci­ety dubs the ​“Faw­cett freaks” – ama­teur adven­tur­ers who suc­cumbed to the lure of an obses­sion that led them along a path to tragedy.

Break­ing with Grann’s struc­tur­al device, James Gray’s screen adap­ta­tion sets out Fawcett’s tale in straight­for­ward bio­graph­i­cal terms. He for­goes the metaphor­i­cal allu­sions found in the erst­while jun­gle jol­lies of Wern­er Herzog’s jour­ney into the abyss, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, or 2015’s sim­i­lar, superla­tive Embrace of the Ser­pent, by Ciro Guer­ra. Gray has proven him­self a mas­ter match­mak­er of form and con­tent. He amped up styl­is­tic licks for the genre-inflect­ed We Own the Night, then tem­pered them in the face of Two Lovers’ qui­eter emo­tion­al melo­dra­ma. The Lost City of Z sees him oper­at­ing in a broad­er clas­si­cal mode, both nar­ra­tive­ly and formally.

The set­ting alone can’t help but invoke the spir­it of Joseph Con­rad (the author famed for his 1899 nov­el, ​‘Heart of Dark­ness’), but beyond such super­fi­cial touch­stones, Gray’s films have all been inter­est­ed in that ubiq­ui­tous, Con­ra­di­an ques­tion of self-def­i­n­i­tion. A sub­tle, inci­sive cul­tur­al ethno­g­ra­ph­er, Gray has long estab­lished micro-com­mu­ni­ties and set them against a broad­er social can­vas, allow­ing his black sheep to roam free. The notion of ​‘home’ is cen­tral to Gray’s back cat­a­logue, and affords Z its pri­ma­ry the­mat­ic con­flict, albeit one paint­ed in overt­ly lit­er­al terms.

Fawcett’s wife, Nina (Sien­na Miller), proves to be anoth­er of Gray’s female char­ac­ters whose fate is defined by their male coun­ter­part. The film’s end­ing may belong to her – a mag­nif­i­cent final shot evokes that of the director’s pre­vi­ous film, The Immi­grant, as she turns her back on her own reflec­tion to step into her miss­ing husband’s quest – but Gray’s script (“I’m an inde­pen­dent woman!”) does her few favours throughout.

Miller deliv­ers a fine per­for­mance nonethe­less, not least in her clos­ing mono­logue, even if she can’t quite escape her essen­tial moder­ni­ty. It’s a prob­lem crip­pling­ly shared by Char­lie Hunnam’s Faw­cett, a role cry­ing out for a degree of psy­cho­log­i­cal com­plex­i­ty that is not pro­vid­ed either by Gray or his lead. If Grann’s Faw­cett is intend­ed to be tak­en as defin­i­tive, Gray’s approach is revi­sion­ist, to sim­plis­ti­cal­ly dimin­ish­ing returns.

The Lost City of Z’s tech­ni­cal cre­den­tials are unim­peach­able and serve as the pri­ma­ry means of engage­ment. Dar­ius Khondji’s cin­e­matog­ra­phy is noth­ing short of god-lev­el, and Gray con­tin­ues to prove him­self a stel­lar sound­scape design­er. Yet for all the set-pieces he directs the hell out of – an open­ing hunt; a piran­ha attack – it’s only in its ellip­ti­cal final throes that the film eclipses its sur­face plea­sures, as the epony­mous city shifts from nar­ra­tive goal to vaporous MacGuffin.