Gray, who adapted Grann’s book himself, builds the film around three separate South American expeditions-a distillation of the seven that Fawcett took, shot on location-and subsequent homecomings, with a brief but memorable parenthesis for service in the trenches of World War I. As for the period setting, Gray’s last film, The Immigrant (2013), set in the swarming Lower East Side of 1921, can be seen as a logical stepping-stone to the still-further-afield locales of The Lost City of Z.Īnd far afield the film does go. And though Gray’s New York is very far away from the tony clubman’s United Kingdom seen in The Lost City of Z, it has its own haves and have nots, and its own gentrymen: James Caan, living in outer boroughs ducal splendor at his Jamaica Estates manor in The Yards (2000), or Elias Koteas’s Manhattan smoothie with law firm box seats at the Metropolitan Opera in Two Lovers. Familial expectation and duty, and the crushing burden they impose, is a theme which recurs in his films, beginning with the thermonuclear domestic meltdown of Little Odessa (1995) and continuing through the cop dynasty guilt-trip of We Own the Night (2007) and the love triangle of Two Lovers (2008), in which nice Jewish boy Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix) exchanges a deal-brokering kiss with the nice Jewish girl (Vinessa Shaw) hand-picked by his parents in front of a wall laden with family photographs. This is both more and less of a departure for Gray than it might seem. “He’s been rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors” is how we hear one old duffer-Murray Melvin of Barry Lyndon fame -put it shortly before disappearing behind closed doors with the bona fide gentlemen as tarnished Fawcett looks from across the room in envy, still second-class in spite of the fact that he’s ostensibly being celebrated for his valor in the morning’s hunt. The dynamic between Percy and the young adult Jack, played by Charlie Hunnam and Tom Holland, becomes central in the film’s final act, but when we first meet Fawcett, stationed in Ireland in 1905, he is preoccupied with another father-son dynamic, for his own late father’s reputation as a wastrel and gambler has consistently scuppered his chances for advancement and glory. It is also his first film in which the tension that defined his works seems somewhat to have slackened, where the ceremony of the filmmaking fits its subjects hand in glove.Īt the center of the film is Percy Fawcett, a man at ease in a stag hunt or a ballroom, and the real-life subject of Grann’s book-an artilleryman and veteran of World War I whose lasting fame came through a series of expeditions into the Amazon in search of evidence of pre-Columbian civilization in the jungle, concluding with his disappearance in May 1925, on a final trek undertaken in the company of his eldest son, Jack. Gray’s sixth feature, The Lost City of Z, is a departure in several respects-it’s his first film set outside of the United States and his first adapted from an outside source, the history/memoir of the same name by David Grann. It probably seemed pompous to some, certainly pleasurable to others-and I have long counted myself among those who saw something sublime in Gray’s elegantly shooting a civic ceremony with appearances by Keith Hernandez and Allan Houston as though making a bridge-and-tunnel Visconti film. James Gray made his name on a series of films that applied a somber, dignified, and stately style to parochial, working-class subjects, and in this disparity there was a certain tension.
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