Photo caption: Mia McKenna-Bruce in HOW TO HAVE SEX. Courtesy of MUBI.
In the searingly realistic How to Have Sex, three British teen girls glamorize a holiday week of binge drinking, clubbing and casual sex, so they head for the beach town of Malia on the island of Crete. Malia’s hotel and bar scene caters to British teenagers, producing a kind of a Cabo San Lucas/Daytona Beach/South Padre Island spring break culture with a lot less restraint. In Britain, kids can move on from high school at age sixteen, so this is like American Spring Break with a heavy dose of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds in the mix.
All three are gung ho on partying, but the lone virgin, Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), has the additional goal of her first sexual experience. Obviously, if a sixteen-year-old girl is determined to get as drunk as possible and lose her virginity in an unsupervised party frenzy with hundreds of drunk teenage boys, her quest can go painfully wrong in many easily imaginable ways. Hence, the joyous exuberance of the girls’ partying, is underpinned by the audience’s escalating sense of dread.
The three besties immediately self-intoxicate, meet some guys in their hotel and party essentially non-stop, cycling between poolside, beach and disco, stopping only to pass out. Rinse and repeat. How to Have Sex narrows its focus on Tara’s experience, which becomes more fraught, more emotionally isolated and devastating.
In her first feature, writer-Director Molly Manning Walker achieves remarkable verisimilitude in the weeklong party rampage, so much so that Mick LaSalle wrote, “The great strength and slight weakness of “How to Have Sex” is that it’s just like being there — except you might not want to be there.”
Anchoring herself in authenticity, Manning Walker is comfortable with ambiguity, whether in the relationships between the girlfriends or their attitudes, behaviors and feelings. She has not made a message picture, a political screed or a cautionary tale, but her audiences certainly notices organized beach games that are premised on females as sex objects and circumstances that beg the question of what constitutes acceptable consent.
The performance of Mia McKenna-Bruce as Tara is astonishingly raw, nuanced, heartbreaking and hopeful. Other critics describe it as “star-making”, which will depend on her getting material this good in the future.
The actresses playing Tara’s friends, Lara Peake and Enva Lewis, are also very, very good.
(Manning Walker was the cinematographer for Scrapper, another debut coming of age film by a female British writer-director, Charlotte Regan).
How to Have Sex is an impressive directorial debut for Molly Manning Walker, who is not afraid to make her audience uncomfortable. This is a movie more to be admired than enjoyed. How to Have Sex is streaming on MUBI.
Aylin Tezel and Chris Fulton in FALLING INTO PLACE. Courtesy of Cinequest.
The absorbing Scottish romantic drama Falling into Place begins on the Isle of Skye when two visiting London creatives meet outside a rowdy pub and flirt. Kira (Aylin Tezel), a theater set designer, is on holiday. Ian (Chris Fulton), a musician, has grown up on Skye and intends to shoehorn in an infrequent visit with his family. Kira is trying to get beyond a recent breakup, while Ian’s relationship is in its final throes.
When Kira hears that Ian has a girlfriend, she puts in the brakes, but she’s drawn enough to Ian that she accompanies him as he faces some family drama. Then, Kira and Ian return separately to London. The audience soon wants these two to get and stay together, but they’ll need to get past some trauma in Ian’s family, his current romantic entanglement, Kyra’s feelings for her ex, an attractive boss with his eyes on Kira and some bad timing.
Utterly devoid of the tropes in conventional movie romances, Falling into Place is profoundly authentic. This is the first feature for German-born writer/director Aylin Tezel (who also stars as Kira), and it’s a very strong and promising debut. As a director, she paces Falling into Place perfectly, keeping us eagerly engaged as the threads if Kira and Ian meet and part and meet again. She is especially adept directing the scenes in the Isle of Skye bar and the London art gallery opening, with lots of moving bodies and ambient sound. But it’s Tezel’s screenplay, without a single false note, that really soars.
I screened Falling Into Place for its US premiere at Cinequest.
Photo caption: Harris Dickinson and Lola Campbell in Charlotte Regan’s SCRAPPER. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.
In the delightful coming of age dramedy Scrapper, Georgie, a precocious 12-year-old girl, thinks that she is independently living her best life, until the unexpected appearance of the dad she hasn’t known.
In her first feature, British writer-director Charlotte Regan has created a deliciously charming character, played to roguish perfection by Lola Campbell. Streetwise and mischievous, Georgie is able to outsmart the adults who might be expected to be providing more effective oversight.
Regan gradually reveals why Georgie is living alone, and the back story of her family. The screenplay, about loss, connection and second chances, is brimming with humanity.
Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness) is very good as the dad.
Scrapper won the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema/Dramatic at Sundance. I screened Scrapper for the SLO Film Fest, where it was my favorite film. Scrapper is playing Cinequest tonight, and opening in theaters this weekend.
Alan Cumming in MY OLD SCHOOL, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
The absorbing documentary My Old School is about a guy who fooled his Scottish high school classmates and, notably, the school authorities, into believing that he was not who he really was. The impersonation was extreme, audacious and more than a little creepy, and resulted in a scandal well-known in the British Isles.
Writer-director Jono McLeod was one of those classmates, and he has been able to garner more than a handful of the kids and teachers who were eyewitnesses. And he secured over five hours of audio from the impersonator himself, which are brilliantly lip-synced by actor Alan Cummings (kind of the opposite of voiced by).
MY OLD SCHOOL, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
If that weren’t creative enough, McLeod uses animation to illustrate key moments in the story. And, surprisingly, there comes a video clip of a high school performance of the musical South Pacific, a performance that would be excruciatingly mundane – except for what the audience knows.
In telling My Old School, McLeod reveals the deception itself right away and then gradually unspools a series of more shockers, about how the ruse was executed, with whose help and the motivation. It’s quite the story.
My Old School opens in theaters this weekend, including at the Opera Plaza in San Francisco.
Roger Livesey in THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP
The 1943 masterpiece The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is a remarkably textured portrait of a man over four decades and his struggles to evolve into new eras. Written and directed by the great British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, this is a movie with a sharp message to 1940s audiences about modernity, as well as a subtle exploration of privilege that will resonate today.
The character of Clive Candy, when we first seem him as an old man, is the butt of a humorous scene, being made fun of as out of touch and ridiculously old-fashioned. Candy, a veteran of sabre duels between 19th Century gentleman officers, still naively thinks that wars should be fought according to rules. Made in the urgency of wartime 1943, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp pointedly delivers the message that the old fuddy duddies should get out of the way. Only modern men can fight the quintessentially modern threat – the Nazis with their propaganda and industrialized genocide.
But Powell and Pressburger can make this argument without emasculating or demonizing Blimp; he is a good man, just a good man whose time has passed – and it is what it is.
We see flashbacks of the younger Clive Candy and see his bravery, steadfastness, loyalty, sentimentality, romance, and his occasional wit. He is a man devoted to a code of behavior. always profoundly anchored to doing the right thing and willing to sacrifice (in both love and war).
Candy is also a creature of privilege, and he’s clueless about that privilege. He is an upper crust Englishman in a class-driven, all male and all-white power structure. His day job is serving an empire whose premise is the suppression and exploitation of darker skinned peoples peoples. He never has to compete, on the merits, with women or with the working class or people of color. He just assumes that he should be a military leader and that England should have an empire; but he also unquestionably shoulders the duties and obligations that goes with the leadership and the empire.
Roger Livesey plays Candy as he ages over the forty years. Livesey often played decent and genial romantic leads, and I usually find those roles pretty bland. But here Livesey convincingly depicts a man who believes that he must never change, even as he faces heartbreak or changing times.
Anton Walbrook excels as Candy’s German peer, an officer of Candy’s generation who realizes in the 1940s that their time has passed. I’ve lately warmed to Walbrook, who was typecast as romantic, European dandies early in his career; his later work, in Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes and The 49th Parallel, Max Ophul’s Le Plaisir and La Ronde and the 1940, less well known version of, Gaslight, is excellent.
The always coolly reliable Deborah Kerr appears in multiple roles, playing three different women who show up in Candy’s life.
Powell and Pressburger insert plenty of humor and smart filmmaking to tell this story. The montage of mounted animal heads that spans the period between the world wars is especially witty.
Clive Candy is a creature of his time – which TLADOCB unsentimentally depicts as having passed. But there is value in this man. Just like with Wille Loman – attention must be paid.
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp airs October 15 on Turner Clssic Movies and is available to stream from Amazon, AppleTV and the Criterion Channel.
Roger Livesey in THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP
Prime Suspect, the perfect Labor Day weekend binge, pairs one of cinema’s greatest actresses, Helen Mirren, with one of the most compelling characters ever on episodic television, Detective Jane Tennison. At once a sensational crime show and a high brow character study, the seven seasons of Prime Suspect follow a female protagonist over fifteen years.
Prime Suspect is a set of nine separate stories over 25 hours. Jane Tennison’s career spans from Chief Detective Inspector to Superintendent to Chief Superintendent. The episodes were created between 1991 and 20O5, and Helen Mirren herself ages from 46 to 60 in the role.
The core of Prime Suspect is the character of Jane Tennison, forged by writer Lynda La Plante and Mirren. Jane is a driven woman, in a career that ranges from when women cops were unwelcome novelties to more politically correct times. In the entire span, Jane is, at best, barely tolerated.
Jane gives as well as she gets. She can force her superiors to promote her by using the same heavy-handed methods they use to suppress her.
Indeed, each Prime Suspect story has multiple threads of conflict. There is, of course, Jane against the criminal she is trying to catch. At the same time, Jane is being distracted and hampered by forces inside her own department. And Jane is in a constant battle to hold herself together amid overbearing stress.
Jane Tennison is a solitary figure, alone with her demons. She faces the daily challenges to her career survival and advancement with an ever-prickly demeanor.
Jane is a person of overwhelming ambition. In the very first season, it’s clear that she cannot advance by being pleasant and waiting her turn. She recognizes that sometimes she has to be unpleasant, and she will need to seize advancement at other’s expense; (in season 3, she receives a critical favor from a peer and then swipes his dream job).
Jane Tennison is also a fully sexual Woman of a Certain Age, but career rock stars like Jane can’t have it all. Her obsession with career leaves a trail of relationship carnage. At one point, Jane has fallen in love with the one man who gets her and adores her, but she has learned about herself and about life and…
And there’s always too much stress. Jane smokes too much and drinks too much. In Prime Suspect 3, her jaw is constantly pounding away on nicotine gum. In one later episode, she drops into her neighborhood market to buy four microwaveable frozen dinners and two fifths of whisky.
At first, Jane faces the most open and unapologetic misogyny, which evolves in later episodes into more veiled and insidious sexism. Being a flawed feminist hero is complicated. As the series evolves, Jane herself discriminates against a subordinate who is parenting. And she is betrayed by a female protege and, later, fights being forced out to pasture by a gender-integrated set of bosses.
Prime Suspect is always topical. Besides the ever-present sexism, the stories touch on race, abortion, postpartum depression, AIDS, sex work and pedophilia.
Most of the Prime Suspect plots are serial killer whodunits, and one story turns on whether she got it wrong in solving her breakthrough case. In one story, we know the culprit right away, but Jane is a race against the clock to prevent further victims.
In an astounding performance, Mirren grips us each time she fiercely deflects yet another indignity, as she waves her hand through her hair when she needs a reset from a setback and as her eyes reveal that she is connecting the dots. Her entire body coils in frustration and stiffens in insubordination. It’s a tour de force.
Between seasons of Prime Suspect, Helen Mirren was compiling an imposing body of work: The Madness of King George, Gosford Park and her Oscar-winning Elizabeth II in The Queen.
I believe that Mirren’s Jane ranks, with James Gandolfini’s run as Tony Soprano, as one of the greatest in episodic dramas. I’m guessing that Mirren was on screen for over twenty hours of Prime Suspect and that Gandolfini was on screen as Tony Sopranos for about 35 of The Sopranos‘ 86 hours. Of course, Prime Suspect’s Jane Tennison is distinguished from most episodic protagonists by being female and by aging fifteen years.
This is one of the best and most entertaining episodic series ever on television. All seven series of Prime Suspect can be streamed from Amazon (included with Prime).
Charlie Hunnam in THE LOST CITY OF Z
photo courtesy of SFFILM
Because the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) was supposed to be underway now (it’s been cancelled for the COVID-19 emergency), here’s a film from SFFILM’s 2017 program. In auteur James Gray’s sweeping turn of the 20th Century epic The Lost City of Z, a stiff-upper-lip type British military officer becomes the first European to probe into the deepest heart of unmapped Amazonia. Finding his way through the lush jungles, braving encounters with sometimes cannibalistic indigenous warriors, he becomes obsessed with finding the lost city of an ancient civilization. I know this sounds like Indiana Jones, but it’s based on the real life of Percy Fawcett as chronicled in the recent book Lost City of Z by David Grann.
The Lost City of Z begins with an Edwardian stag hunt
through the verdant Irish countryside, complete with horses spilling
riders. This scene is gorgeous, but its point is to introduce the young
British military officer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) as a man of
unusual resourcefulness, talent and, above all, drive. Despite his
abilities, he has been chaffing at the unattractive assignments that
have precluded his career advancement. In the snobby Edwardian military,
he has been in disfavor because his dissolute father had stained the
family name. One of Fawcett’s commanders says, “He’s been rather
unfortunate in his choice of ancestors”.
That yearning to earn the recognition that he believes he merits –
and to attain the accomplishments of a Great Man – is the core of this
character-driven movie. Fawcett resists yet another assignment away from
the career-making action, a mapping expedition designed to have a minor
diplomatic payoff. But it takes him on a spectacular Amazon exploration
that brings him celebrity – and backing for more high-profile
expeditions. Fawcett was surfing the zeitgeist in the age of his
contemporaries Roald Amundsen (South Pole), Robert Peary (North Pole)
and Howard Carter (King Tut).
In that first expedition, Fawcett becomes convinced that he can find the magnificent city of a lost civilization deep in the Amazon, a city he calls Z (which is pronounced as the British “Zed”). The Lost City of Z takes us through two more Amazonian expeditions, sandwiched around Fawcett’s WW I service in the hellish Battle of the Somme. That final expedition ends mysteriously – and not well.
No one knows for sure what happened to Fawcett. In The Lost City of Z,
Gray leads us toward the most likely conclusion, the one embraced by
Grann’s book. If you’re interested in the decades of speculation about
Fawcett’s fate, there’s a good outline on Percy Fawcett’s Wikipedia page.
Fawcett comes with his own Victorian upper class prejudices, but he
has the capacity to set those aside for a post-Darwin open-mindedness.
Gray made it a point that the indigenous peoples in the movie are
independent of Fawcett; Gray shows them living their lives in a world
that Fawcett has found, not just advancing the plot points in Fawcett’s
quest. Four real tribes – and their cultures – are shown in the film.
As Percy Fawcett, with his oft-manic obsession and fame-seeking that
color his scientific curiosity and his old-fashioned Dudley Do-Right
values, Charlie Hunnam gives a tremendous, perhaps carer breakthrough,
performance. He’s been a promising actor in Sons of Anarchy and the overlooked thriller Deadfall) (and such a good actor that I never dreamed that he’s really British). Hunnam will next star as the title character in the King Arthur movie franchise.
Robert Pattinson is unexpectedly perfect as Fawcett’s travel buddy Henry Costin. With his Twilight dreaminess hidden behind a Smith Brothers beard, Pattinson projects a lean manliness. It’s probably his best performance.
Sienna Miller shines as Fawcett’s proto-feminist wife Nina. I first
noticed Miller (and Daniel Craig) in the underrated neo-noir thriller
2004 Layer Cake. Now Miller is still only 35 years old and has delivered other fine recent performances in Foxcatcher, American Sniper and (in an especially delicious role) High-Rise.
Director James Gray (The Yard, Two Lovers, The Immigrant) is
a favorite of cinephiles and of other filmmakers, but regular audiences
don’t turn out for his movies. That may change with The Lost City of Z,
a remarkably beautiful film that Gray shot, bucking the trend to
digital, in 35 mm. The jungle scenes were filmed in a national park in
Columbia. The cinemeatographer is the Oscar-nominated Darius Khondji.
Khondji shot The Immigrant for Gray and has been the DP of choice for David Fincher (Se7en) Alan Parker (Evita), Michael Haneke (Amour), and Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris).
Along with the stag hunt and the voyages up and down the jungle rivers,
there is also a breathtakingly beautiful ballroom scene and a gaspingly
surreal nighttime discovery of a rubber plantation’s opera house deep
in the jungle.
There have been other Lost Expedition movies, most famously Werner Herzog’s Aquirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. The Lost City of Z
shares an obsession, a quest and a mysterious tragic end with those
films, but it stands apart with its exploration of the motivation of a
real life character and the authenticity of Gray’s depiction of the
indigenous people.
Movie studios used to make an entire genre of very fun movies from Gunga Din and The Four Feathers through Lawrence of Arabia and Zulu
that featured white Europeans getting their thrills in exotic third
world playgrounds. We often cringe at the racist premises and the
treatment of “the natives” those movies today. Since the 1960s, the best
examples of the genre, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, have had an ironic tinge. With The Lost City of Z, James Gray loses both the racism and the irony, and brings us brings a straight-ahead exploration tale.
The Lost City of Z revives the genre of the historical
adventure epic, with all the spectacle of a swashbuckler, while braiding
in modern sensitivities and a psychological portrait. This is a
beautiful and thoughtful film. The Lost City of Z is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Also see my notes from the director James Gray’s Q & A at the San Francisco International Film Festival. [And here are some completely random tidbits. There’s a cameo by Spaghetti Western star Franco Nero. And the closing credits recognize the “data wrangler”.]
63 Up is the latest chapter in the greatest documentary series in cinema history (and on my list of Greatest Movies of All Time). Starting with Seven Up! in 1964, director Michael Apted has followed the same fourteen British children, filming snapshots of their lives at ages 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49. and 56 – and now at age 63. Choosing kids from different backgrounds, the series started as a critique of the British class system, but has since evolved into a broader exploration of what factors can lead to success and happiness at different stages of human life. (Apted was the hands-on researcher, not the director on Seven Up! and then directed the next nine films in the series.)
We have seen these characters live roller coaster lives. The surprise in 56 Up was how contented they seemed to be, having independently reached a stage in their lives where they live with acceptance and satisfaction; the subjects had already weathered their broken marriages and other dramas and seemed to have settled into themselves. The same is true of 63 Up, but there is more reflection in light of mortality. There’s a death and a life-threatening illness, but all the characters understand that they’re longer at the beginning of their lives.
Because Apted includes clips from earlier films to set the stage for each character, you don’t need to watch all nine movies. Because there is so little conflict in 63 Up, it would be ideal to first screen an edgier film like 35 Up or 42: Forty Two Up. The earlier films are difficult, perhaps impossible, to find streaming, but the entire series (Seven Up!, Seven Plus Seven, 21 Up, 28 Up, 35 Up, 42 Up, 49 Up, 56 Up) is available on Netflix DVDs. 56 Up is streamable on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Kanopy.
The theme of the series at the outset was “Give me a boy of seven and I will give you the man“. This time, Apted asks this question directly of the subjects, with varying results.
As usual, the voluble Tony and the utterly unpredictable Neil are the stars, but I got more out of the stories of Symon and Paul than I had ever before. The biggest surprise for me was the earnest do-gooder teacher Bruce, who I hadn’t ever envisaged as a jovial family patriarch.
63 UP
Michael Apted is a big time director (Coal Miner’s Daughter, Gorillas in the Mist). It is remarkable that he has returned so faithfully to his subjects in the Up series.
I saw 63 Up at the Mill Valley Film Festival, with Apted in attendance. Apted is now 78, and hopes to direct 70 Up if he still has mental acuity. Apted acknowledges that his biggest mistake was not including enough girls at the outset (four girls out of fourteen kids); he’s tried to address it by expanding the roles of several of the male subjects’ female partners.
The Up series is significant and unique cinema – see 63 Up if you can.
A less-remembered moment in human history makes for a great story in Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour, which takes place entirely in May 1940, the period after the German blitzkrieg through the Low Countries on the way to Paris and just before the Dunkirk evacuation.
It’s not always easy today to remember that there was a time when it appeared that Hitler would win WW II. In May 1940, the Nazi empire had swallowed essentially all of Central and Western Europe except for France, which was teetering on the verge of imminent surrender. The entire British Army was trapped, surrounded on a French beach across the Channel.
The UK was both damaged and entirely isolated. Stalin had split Poland with Hitler, and it was over a year before Hitler’s invasion of the USSR. It was also 19 months before Pearl Harbor brought the US into the war. With no hope of external help, Winston Churchill even publicly contemplated the war being carried on by the Commonwealth nations after the German conquest and occupation of the island of Britain.
in Darkest Hours, Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman in a superb, Oscar-worthy performance) has just become Prime Minister. At the time, Churchill was a 66-year-old who had peaked at forty. He had been a superstar daredevil in his twenties who squandered his celebrity in a career dotted by Bad Gambles, where he had repeatedly gone All In and lost all of his chips. By 1940 he was well-known for engineering a horrific military disaster at Gallipoli in WW I and for a series of political party changes. Not the confidence-inspiring figure we think of today.
So in this situation, what to do? One option was to embark on what one could rationally conclude would be a suicidal course of waging aggressive war and risking obliteration. Another option would be to negotiate the most favorable surrender with Nazi Germany. No good choices here.
If Churchill begins trash talking the Germans just before their invasion, is that delusional or intellectually dishonest? Or a moment of inspired leadership?
Churchill’s selection as Prime Minister was forced on the former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his top foreign affairs expert Lord Halifax, and the two were understandably concerned that Churchill might be leading the nation to its (literal) ruin. They lay a trap, but great politicians like Lincoln and Churchill do not let themselves be trapped.
The core of Darkest Hour is Churchill probing for a solution while under the most oppressive stress and pressure. In Darkest Hour, his outsized personality and eccentricities sprinkle the story with humor. Churchill, well-known for consuming a bottle of champagne with both lunch and dinner and working, slugging down brandy and whisky, late into the night, is shown having breakfast eggs with champagne and whisky. When the King, at lunch, asks him, “How do you manage drinking during the day?”, Winston replies, “Practice”.
Oldman is as good as any of the fine actors who have played Churchill. Kristin Scott-Thomas is especially excellent (no surprise here) as Churchill’s wife of then 32 years, Clementine. Lily James (Lady Rose in Downton Abbey) is appealing as the fictional secretary through whose eyes the audience sees the private Churchill. Ben Mendelsohn is very good as King George VI, who has watched Churchill’s career to date askance. Stephen Dillane is particularly good as Lord Halifax,
There is one especially touching, but wholly phony scene with a “poll” in the Underground, but, other than that, Darkest Hour is very solid history.
Joe Wright is a fine director, and, here, has selected a moment in history that has sparked an exceptionally good movie. I saw Darkest Hours with a multiplex audience, which erupted into a smattering of applause at the end.
Charlie Hunnam in THE LOST CITY OF Z photo courtesy of SFFILM
In auteur James Gray’s sweeping turn of the 20th Century epic The Lost City of Z, a stiff-upper-lip type British military officer becomes the first European to probe into the deepest heart of unmapped Amazonia. Finding his way through the lush jungles, braving encounters with sometimes cannibalistic indigenous warriors, he becomes obsessed with finding the lost city of an ancient civilization. I know this sounds like Indiana Jones, but it’s based on the real life of Percy Fawcett as chronicled in the recent book Lost City of Z by David Grann.
The Lost City of Z opens tomorrow in Bay Area theaters. I saw The Lost City of Z at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival) at a screening with director James Gray. I’ll be sharing some snippets from Gray’s Q & A on Sunday.
The Lost City of Z begins with an Edwardian stag hunt through the verdant Irish countryside, complete with horses spilling riders. This scene is gorgeous, but its point is to introduce the young British military officer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) as a man of unusual resourcefulness, talent and, above all, drive. Despite his abilities, he has been chaffing at the unattractive assignments that have precluded his career advancement. In the snobby Edwardian military, he has been in disfavor because his dissolute father had stained the family name. One of Fawcett’s commanders says, “He’s been rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors”.
That yearning to earn the recognition that he believes he merits – and to attain the accomplishments of a Great Man – is the core of this character-driven movie. Fawcett resists yet another assignment away from the career-making action, a mapping expedition designed to have a minor diplomatic payoff. But it takes him on a spectacular Amazon exploration that brings him celebrity – and backing for more high-profile expeditions. Fawcett was surfing the zeitgeist in the age of his contemporaries Roald Amundsen (South Pole), Robert Peary (North Pole) and Howard Carter (King Tut).
In that first expedition, Fawcett becomes convinced that he can find the magnificent city of a lost civilization deep in the Amazon, a city he calls Z (which is pronounced as the British “Zed”). The Lost City of Z takes us through two more Amazonian expeditions, sandwiched around Fawcett’s WW I service in the hellish Battle of the Somme.
That final expedition ends mysteriously – and not well.
No one knows for sure what happened to Fawcett. In The Lost City of Z, Gray leads us toward the most likely conclusion, the one embraced by Grann’s book. If you’re interested in the decades of speculation about Fawcett’s fate, there’s a good outline on Percy Fawcett’s Wikipedia page.
Fawcett comes with his own Victorian upper class prejudices, but he has the capacity to set those aside for a post-Darwin open-mindedness. Gray made it a point that the indigenous peoples in the movie are independent of Fawcett; Gray shows them living their lives in a world that Fawcett has found, not just advancing the plot points in Fawcett’s quest. Four real tribes – and their cultures – are shown in the film.
As Percy Fawcett, with his oft-manic obsession and fame-seeking that color his scientific curiosity and his old-fashioned Dudley Do-Right values, Charlie Hunnam gives a tremendous, perhaps carer breakthrough, performance. He’s been a promising actor in Sons of Anarchy and the overlooked thriller Deadfall) (and such a good actor that I never dreamed that he’s really British). Hunnam will next star as the title character in the King Arthur movie franchise.
Robert Pattinson is unexpectedly perfect as Fawcett’s travel buddy Henry Costin. With his Twilight dreaminess hidden behind a Smith Brothers beard, Pattinson projects a lean manliness. It’s probably his best performance.
Sienna Miller shines as Fawcett’s proto-feminist wife Nina. I first noticed Miller (and Daniel Craig) in the underrated neo-noir thriller 2004 Layer Cake. Now Miller is still only 35 years old and has delivered other fine recent performances in Foxcatcher, American Sniper and (in an especially delicious role) High-Rise.
Director James Gray (The Yard, Two Lovers, The Immigrant) is a favorite of cinephiles and of other filmmakers, but regular audiences don’t turn out for his movies. That may change with The Lost City of Z, a remarkably beautiful film that Gray shot, bucking the trend to digital, in 35 mm. The jungle scenes were filmed in a national park in Columbia. The cinemeatographer is the Oscar-nominated Darius Khondji. Khondji shot The Immigrant for Gray and has been the DP of choice for David Fincher (Se7en) Alan Parker (Evita), Michael Haneke (Amour), and Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris). Along with the stag hunt and the voyages up and down the jungle rivers, there is also a breathtakingly beautiful ballroom scene and a gaspingly surreal nighttime discovery of a rubber plantation’s opera house deep in the jungle.
There have been other Lost Expedition movies, most famously Werner Herzog’s Aquirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. The Lost City of Z shares an obsession, a quest and a mysterious tragic end with those films, but it stands apart with its exploration of the motivation of a real life character and the authenticity of Gray’s depiction of the indigenous people.
Movie studios used to make an entire genre of very fun movies from Gunga Din and The Four Feathers through Lawrence of Arabia and Zulu that featured white Europeans getting their thrills in exotic third world playgrounds. We often cringe at the racist premises and the treatment of “the natives” those movies today. Since the 1960s, the best examples of the genre, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, have had an ironic tinge. With The Lost City of Z, James Gray loses both the racism and the irony, and brings us brings a straight-ahead exploration tale.
The Lost City of Z revives the genre of the historical adventure epic, with all the spectacle of a swashbuckler, while braiding in modern sensitivities and a psychological portrait. This is a beautiful and thoughtful film. The Lost City of Z is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Also see my notes from the director James Gray’s Q & A at the San Francisco International Film Festival.[And here are some completely random tidbits. There’s a cameo by Spaghetti Western star Franco Nero. The closing credits recognize the “animal weath coordinator” and the “data wrangler”.]
