“The Lost City of Z”: In James Gray’s Epic, It’s Not the Destination, but the Journey

The Lost City of Z is the latest film from director James Gray (We Own the Night, Two Lovers), and it’s his “biggest” feature yet, a bona fide epic adventure set in the early 20th century. It is also Gray’s best work to date, a film of remarkable focus and profundity that handily earns its 141-minute running time. Based on the bestselling nonfiction book of the same name by David Grann, Z concerns the British explorer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) and his obsessive ambition to discover a fabled city deep in the Amazon rain forest. The early scenes of Gray’s film present snapshots of Fawcett’s life leading up to his first South American foray: his alpha male ease with the physical demands of military life; his bitterness at being passed over for promotion; and the relatively enlightened, secularist views he shares with his feisty wife Nina (Sienna Miller).

Fawcett’s path changes forever when he’s lent out to the Royal Geographic Society to perform a border survey between Bolivia and Brazil. He is teamed with fellow British soldier and explorer Henry Costin (Robert Pattinson, bearded and bespectacled) and the pair assemble a crew in Bolivia to find a particular river’s source. The expedition encounters a daunting array of lethal obstacles—disease, starvation, piranhas, mutiny—but Fawcett ultimately makes a momentous discovery. At the river’s headwaters, he stumbles upon pottery and carvings that suggest an advanced culture, seemingly confirming his indigenous guide’s tale of a city concealed deep within the forest.

Thus begins Fawcett’s lifetime passion to locate the place that he dubs Z, a ruined pre-Columbian metropolis that he hopes will provide proof of native Amazonian peoples’ ingenuity. Gray’s screenplay condenses the seven expeditions that Fawcett actually took down to three and elsewhere revises some historical details for the sake of a smoother story. But Z’s objective is not to present and interpret facts (Grann’s book handles that well enough, after all). Rather, Gray’s film fashions a faintly hallucinatory depiction of Fawcett’s evolving attitude and worldview. Although it necessarily echoes cinematic touchstones about fanatical explorers like Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Touching the Void, Z refrains from cribbing from them, finding its own filmic vocabulary.

There is a strange enticement in the chant-like rhythm of the film’s setting changes—Britain, Amazon, repeat. Gray pointedly gives Edwardian London and the trenches of the Great War the same attentiveness that he bestows on the flora and fauna of Bolivia. While Z looms like Shangri-La in Fawcett’s mind, Gray is absorbed with all of the forces that shaped the man’s journey through life. Hunnam is compelling as Fawcett without once straying into distracting King Lear histrionics. Through Gray’s elegant script, he paints a picture of a sensitive but vain man whose understanding of his place in the world is humbled, hardened, and humbled again.

Gray’s films often feature familiar story lines, but they also have an aptitude for snaking through the human heart and shrewdly revealing the convoluted reasons people behave as they do. Appropriately, the splendor of The Lost City of Z lies in its manifold layers, which jostle against one another like the buzzing, rustling strata between the soil and crown of the rain forest. It simultaneously celebrates and critiques the human urge to explore, both generally and in the specific context of European colonialism. It probes the meaning of success and failure at different levels—nation, family, individual—and captures the thrill and angst of discovering that one is most at home in a place that is not home. In short, Z is a contender as one of the richest American films of the year.

Opens Friday, April 21 at the Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema and Tivoli Theatre.