Laurence here. Many people were disappointed by the way James Gray's The Immigrant went mostly unnoticed beyond critics' groups. From the story to the stars, it seemed like a fairly strong prospect to garner Gray some mainstream awards attention, but the Weinsteins never seemed confident in it. Now Gray is making a decidedly more bombastic play to voting members with his new film, The Lost City of Z. This time he's paired up with Jennifer Aniston's former production company, Plan B, which has become very good at producing Best Picture nominees.
Based on David Grann's non-fiction bestseller of the same title, The Lost City of Z stars Charlie Hunnam as Percy Fawcett, a British explorer in the 1920s who led an expedition to the Amazon rainforest in search of a mysterious lost city. Grann's book chronicles the numerous attempts over the years to follow Fawcett's footsteps, with evidence emerging in 2005 that the city perhaps did, in some form, exist. The film seems to primarily function as a biopic of Fawcett, whose obsession with Z's existence led him into the heart of darkness.
Let's break down the now hard-to-find trailer after the jump...
Yes
- The Look. This film looks utterly sumptuous; Gray is said to be an avowed fan of Apocalypse Now, and you can very much feel its influence in these images as filtered through the muted period colour palette...
- ...that he developed with Madonna's "Frozen" video cinematographer Darius Khondji, who shot The Immigrant, a film which was perhaps a little too restrained but utterly gorgeous to look at, up to an including that excellent final shot.
- Robert Pattinson carves another notch into his auteur bedpost, co-starring as Corporal Henry Costin, who accompanies Fawcett on his expedition, and his presence in a film like this is exciting.
- Also co-starring as Fawcett's son is newly minted Spiderman, Tom Holland, who hasn't really had a chance to show what he can do on the big screen since his breakthrough in The Impossible.
- Counter-programming. Action-adventure films, loosely though that genre may apply given Gray's cerebral style, are becoming fewer and further between. This is likely to be more Fitzcarraldo than Road to Zanzibar, the 1941 Bing Crosby/Bob Hope film which was initially based on a story about finding Colonel Fawcett but, due to plot similarities to 1939's Stanley and Livingstone, instead became a light comedic romp without reference to Fawcett at all.
- The story has the potential to be totally engrossing given what happened to Fawcett in real life. World War I! Cannibals! Boats! Suits! Facial hair!
No
- At first glance, it feels like it could have touches of the white saviour syndrome that often befalls films like these, though in context - and given the story's factual basis - it might be a feature, not a bug. Still, expect thinkpieces.
- The trailer blares, "HIS COURAGE...HIS COMPASSION...HIS CONVICTION...WOULD CHANGE THE WORLD", which makes me concerned that they're not sure how to sell this film.
- The only female character appears to be Fawcett's wife, who will presumably be around solely to serve as a voice of reason/nag. Plus she's played by Sienna Miller, who is mostly forgettable, and apparently now utterly addicted to girlfriend/wife roles.
Maybe So
- It was exciting that Charlie Hunnam would get to make use of his native accent again after the distractingly wooden drawl he employed in Pacific Rim and Crimson Peak, and yet his upper-crust English explorer accent sounds almost as silly.
- If it's anything like The Immigrant - or The Revenant, to which it seems tonally similar - this could be a very sober, dour movie.
- This trailer leaked a couple of weeks ago and is no longer available on YouTube. In this day and age, typically a trailer leak forces a studio - Paramount, in this case - to release the real thing. Crickets on that front and no mention of the film at CinemaCon despite principal photography wrapping late last year. Might this end up pushed to 2017, or could it possibly end up at Cannes like most of Gray's previous features?
At this stage, I'm a pretty emphatic YES on this. It's new territory for Gray, and that he's cited David Lean and 1960s 65mm epics as inspiration for the film, it's difficult not to be.
Are you a YES, NO, or a MAYBE SO?