But in The Lost City of Z, Browning’s dictum is the way the British explorer Percy Fawcett conducts every second of his life. There are no trivial pursuits. This is an epic film of epic proportion on an epic quest with an epic failure. Forgive me, but just so you know, as these are English searching for a quasi mythical city, El Dorado like, the pronunciation is The Lost City of Zed.
Based on David Grann’s fascinating nonfiction bestseller, first an article in the New Yorker, then extended into book length, The Lost City of Z is the story of an explorer who risks it all. Life and limb, literally, along with his health, reputation, finances and family are threatened by his quixotic quest to discover a lost civilization deep in the Amazon jungle of South America. When so many of the Empire's explorers went for their holy trinity of Gold, Glory and God, in that order, Fawcett went to the Amazon time and again but not for Christianity and capitalism. He is drawn to this treacherous landscape to uncover any possible evidence of a previously unknown, advanced civilization, even in the face of the scientific establishment that both financed and derided his efforts.
They are never seen again.
One crucial difference between the film and the book (yes, I did read the book in preparation to preview the film) is that the book alternates the story of Fawcett’s quest and disappearance with the modern efforts to locate him and his son. Numerous international scientific investigations since 1925 have recreated his multiple routes. Comparisons of the official log notations of the recorded longitude and latitude (Fawcett was a surveyor) of his travels along with other evidence show he intentionally misidentified the true location of discoveries.He obviously wanted to deter others from claiming and poaching what he saw as truly his and his alone.
Fawcett discovers some shards on his first trip, then defies the skeptics and returns for a second expedition, this one including famous Arctic adventurer James Murray (Angus Macfadyen), likely the biggest mistake of both their adventuring lives. An overweight explorer used to snow and ice, entitled to deference by his class, is of no use in the steamy jungle. Yes, they encounter hostile locals, poisoned darts, piranha, cannibals, flesh rotting disease, incessant insects, dwindling food supplies. Fawcett admits "Exit from Hell is always difficult," but they must return home before the quest is complete. Still, when they encounter cryptic stone sculptures, they know there is an ancient civilization somewhere there beneath the jungle and he's determined to locate it.
Fawcett is filled with his own internal struggles for he finds himself at odds with the British scientific and military establishment, and he is at war with himself for he is a devoted family man who feels he can only find his identity in the jungle thousands of miles from home. Though an experienced soldier and an accomplished explorer, he's still seen as an interloper with an unsavory family history who doesn't know his place. One class-drenched Victorian with a cut glass accent dismisses Fawcett for his "rather unfortunate...choice of ancestors."
At one point Fawcett's wife Nina quotes Rudyard Kipling's The Explorer to her husband (wouldn't more troubled marriages be salvaged if spouses read poetry to one another?): "Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges — Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!" For Fawcett, this something is the Amazon with its vast unexplored and unmapped jungle, its magnitude and profundity, its silence and its overwhelming screech, its nature red in tooth and claw. This Edenic green Hell is a character of its own here, and cinematographer Darius Khondji and production designer Jean-Vincent Puzos film the fecund Colombian jungle exquisitely.
The jungle movie bloodlines are rich and deep behind The Lost City of Z. It follows other jungle obsessives, most notably as in Werner Herzog's two films, Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Even lesser efforts such as The Mosquito Coast, The Emerald Forest, Congo, OK, add Kong: Skull Island, The Jungle Book and George of the Jungle. And of course, we can see that explorer-anthropologist Indiana Jones can claim Percy Fawcett as a worthy ancestor.
Why so many jungle movies? It's a deliciously exotic vista in vivid contrast to our landscaped lawns, a challenge to our politics and ethics and morality and courage, a crucible for defining the meaning of our own existence. The jungle becomes our our own trinity of reach, grasp, and heaven.
