Bolting right out of the gate with a major dose of the old kiss-kiss-bang-bang, The Lost City opens with a bloody, point-blank shooting, then segues into a song. And not just any song: The Lost City dazzles us with a full-blown musical production number performed by a chorus line of scantily clad beauties mambo-ing their way through a room full of well-heeled patrons sipping mojitos and talking about the revolution.
The time is 1958 and the place is Havana, Cuba, in its final glory days of decadent, unrepentant capitalism, just before Castro and his crew took power. It's a place full of exotic sensations and more than a little danger, this vanished world that The Lost City recreates, an over-ripe environment as pretty as a picture and about as kiss-kiss-bang-bang as they come.
Even the stray bits of litter drifting through the Havana of The Lost City seem somehow idealized and fairly dripping with nostalgia. This all begins to make sense when you take into account that the film's director/star, Andy Garcia, fled the country with his family just after the revolution — when he was 5 years old — and the Cuba he shows us is one he never really knew. The Lost City is a dream project for Garcia in just about every sense of those words. But it is not a very good movie.
Garcia spent 16 years bringing The Lost City to the screen, and maybe he was simply too emotionally invested in the project to see where it was going wrong. Or maybe it's just that the longtime actor (who served not only as the film's director, but also as its producer and composer) simply wasn't cut out for working behind the camera. In any event, the film is full of the best intentions, but it's also a monumental mess.
It makes sense that the movie is showing up here in Tampa Bay — areas like ours with strong Cuban communities will almost certainly be more forgiving of the film's flaws and more eager to connect with its passions — but Garcia's good intentions will only get him so far. At a long, cluttered and often excruciating 143 minutes, The Lost City becomes for the rest of us one immensely laborious labor of love.
Based on a big, fat novel by the late Guillermo Cabrera Infante, The Lost City is the story of a tightly knit Cuban family being torn apart by the revolution. It is also, as is often the case with sagas like these, a tale of love blossoming in the shadows of political conflict.
Mostly, though, The Lost City seems to be an extended sigh of regret over all those summer homes and gilded pleasure palaces, all that fancy breeding and class that was steamrolled when the commies came to town those many years ago. The film rails against a nation's loss of freedom and democracy, but the way The Lost City frames its argument, those words might just as easily be code for the privileges of money.
The privileged few at the center of Garcia's movie are the Felloves, a prominent Havana family comprised of three brothers lovingly lorded over by a respected academic father (Tomas Milian). Garcia stars as Fico, the least overtly political of the Fellove brothers and proprietor of the most fabulous nightclub in Havana (a setting that provides the periodic musical interludes that are the movie's main saving grace).
Fico's brothers are far more susceptible to the promises of revolutionary change, though, and the movie sets up its familial oppositions early and with fists of purest ham, pounding us with long, earnest arguments in which various slogans and political platitudes are allowed to define the family members in whose mouths they are conveniently placed. "Power to the people!" declares one fired-up Fellove, to which another responds — with a straight face, incredibly enough — "What you need is a little evolution, not revolution."
It gets worse. The Lost City hops from one tangent to the next, leapfrogging from one brother's revolutionary activities, to another brother's love life, to Fico's run-ins with the mob (in the form of American gangster Meyer Lansky, played by Dustin Hoffman as a Jewish caricature kvetching about egg creams). Fidel and Che show up leering from the sidelines every now and then; the overwrought dialogue constantly seems to be sinking under the weight of its own florid metaphors, and various characters proceed to expire in a series of mawkish death scenes, several of which are intercut with more of those fabulous musical numbers.
Somewhere in there, Fico begins comforting Aurora (Ines Sastre), the beautiful widow of a family member and, to practically no one's surprise, the two fall madly in love. This by-the-numbers romance consumes much of the movie's final hour and mainly just provides an opportunity for Garcia to present us with endless montages of the couple strolling through the wonderland of late-'50s Havana (the Dominican Republic, actually, standing in for Cuba).
Fico finally decides to leave for America once Castro takes power, and Aurora agonizes about whether to come with him. But the way The Lost City tells it, none of these people's problems amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
Garcia seems clueless about how to shape this material, and liberally sprinkles the proceedings with self-conscious references to classics like Gone with the Wind, The Godfather and yes, even Casablanca, as if the mere summoning of those hallowed movies might somehow bestow a semblance of credibility upon his project. But The Lost City is aiming way out of its league here. Although it's too long by at least 40 minutes, the movie can't even manage to find time to bring more than a shred of complexity either to its politics or to its stick-figure characters.
But what pushes the movie over the line from well-meaning curiosity to genuinely bad filmmaking is a turn by Bill Murray, who has never been used to worse effect. Murray keeps popping up as Fico's nameless sidekick/alter-ego, an enigmatic character who speaks exclusively in non sequiturs that are surely meant to be clever, maybe even profound, but that come off as tedious, inane or just plain annoying.
It's unclear whether Murray's character is supposed to symbolize something significant or whether he's just there for comedic relief, but any way you look at it, the effect is disastrous. Luckily, there's all that great music and eye-catching dance numbers to divert us when things get too problematic, but there's no getting around it: For much of its considerable running time, The Lost City isn't half the movie it wants to be.
This article appears in May 17-23, 2006.