Green hell

Writer-director James Gray’s The Lost City of Z (it sounds better if you pronounce it “Zed,” the British rendition of the last letter of the alphabet) is refreshingly old-fashioned. Based on David Grann’s book, it tells the story of Percy Fawcett, the British soldier-explorer who became obsessed with finding a lost civilization that he believed once existed deep in the Amazon jungle. Fawcett made repeated trips in search of it (interrupted by service in World War I); on his last expedition in 1925, he and his eldest son Jack disappeared, never to be heard from again.

Charlie Hunnam plays Fawcett with a single-minded, stiff-upper-lip idealism. His Fawcett becomes an explorer almost by accident: In 1906, Maj. Fawcett is commissioned by the Royal Geographical Society to settle a boundary dispute between Bolivia and Brazil that threatens to lead to war and jeopardize the lucrative rubber trade with the Amazon basin. To mediate the dispute, Fawcett is sent to survey the boundary as a disinterested third party, and it’s here that he finds intriguing pottery shards and hears rumors of an ancient civilization.

Fawcett’s theory is bolstered, in his own mind at least, by the 1911 discovery of Machu Picchu in Peru. But that doesn’t keep him from being hooted down at a meeting of the RGS, where the members jeer at the thought of Amazonian “savages” ever having enjoyed anything as lofty as a civilization. Undaunted, Fawcett mounts a second expedition, with inconclusive results.

An additional burden in Fawcett’s obsession is the toll on his family, especially his spirited wife Nina (Sienna Miller, making a deep impression with surprisingly little screen time). Fawcett’s repeated long absences, in both South America and the trenches of the Western Front, creates tensions that add to the drama of the movie, especially when he and the teenage Jack (Daniel Huttlestone) come to blows over it. When Fawcett is temporarily blinded in a German gas attack, father and son bury the hatchet; some years later, as a young man (now Tom Holland), Jack will accompany his father on his last exploration and vanish with him.

Apart from that raucous scene at the RGS and the British contempt for “savages,” Gray avoids skewing his story with post-colonial hand-wringing about the White Man’s Burden, and he doesn’t lapse into clichés about going mad in the jungle—that’s part of what makes The Lost City of Z old-fashioned and refreshing. Instead, he burrows into the exploration fever of a century ago, when a hefty chunk of the globe remained unknown, when Machu Picchu and King Tut’s tomb were the latest news. Gray and cinematographer Darius Khondji etch a vivid picture of the green hell of the Amazon and its unfamiliar inhabitants.

Toward the end Gray wanders from history into speculation about Fawcett’s fate, drifting into a facile half-mysticism that, though visually striking, overstays its welcome and makes the movie feel even longer than it is. The Lost City of Z never quite pulls us into Fawcett’s obsession, but it draws a respectful, respectable picture of it that keeps us watching, interested if not deeply involved.