James Gray
The Lost City of Z

A James Gray deserves a big round of applause for being one of the very few who still dares to challenge the Hollywood mainstream with timeless films. Perhaps no one today has the ability to bring a film like "The Lost City of Z" to the big screen, except for big names like Tarantino and Scorsese, who have the ability to produce films on their own. Gray cannot do this, and for that reason, the birth of his latest work, which arrived to us as always with the title distorted to "Civiltà perduta", was complicated, with delays, problems on set, and distribution issues.

But why did Gray's latest film have trouble reaching theaters? James Gray is a tremendously classic director: he derives his style from great masters like Scorsese and Coppola and from the most classic of living American filmmakers, namely Eastwood. His early works, at least up to "We Own the Night," are condensations of noir and classicism. Gray, in short, offers little to today's audience: slow rhythms, old-fashioned editing, scripts that put action in the background. It seems like we've returned to the '70s, far from modern cinema with video game-like pace, quips, and trivialization of the cinematic medium (thank goodness there are still those who distance themselves from this degeneration). Now, Gray's last work was "C'era una volta a New York" (again, original title "The Immigrant"). A period piece set in pre-1929 disaster America. A vintage melodrama not quite memorable. An indigestible mishmash for those not familiar with past film construction. At the box office, an anticipated flop. What does he do 3 years later? He tries to bring another period film of over two hours to the big screen, recounting topographical journeys in Bolivia echoing the cadence of a Werner Herzog. In 2018. Madness. Again, knowing that the box office result would be disastrous. Naturally, that's how it went. Costing around 40 million, it only grossed 15.

England, early 1900s. Percy (Charlie Hunnam) is an army officer with a background in topographical and geographical studies. For him, career is important, but his plans are upended by the request to draw the correct borders between Bolivia and Brazil on the brink of a war for rubber control. It's also a way to restore his family's reputation, dishonored by his father. Reluctantly, he leaves. In the depths of the Amazon, he finds nature in its raw roughness and perhaps a city, a vestige of some ancient civilization. It's his "City of Z." The rest of his life will be the search for this "lost civilization."

Gray's film is a work about escape and obsession. An escape from a backward United Kingdom, even in its scientific circles, an escape from himself and from a past that conditions Percy without having had a say in defining it. And then escape becomes obsession, a compulsive search for a reality that may or may not exist: Percy will go back and forth in the Amazon, in search of his obsession, fame, and destiny, as the seer will prophetically tell him before the Battle of the Somme during the Great War. Because Gray places these journeys within a broader gaze that also encompasses moments of return home, conflicts with his family, and his wife, a splendid Sienna Miller. This "coming and going," somewhat cutting the classic times that Gray uses, is perhaps the only true weak point in terms of filmic choice, "trivializing" the most interesting part, constituted precisely by the journeys in the Amazon, for obvious moments of screen time. This does not prevent the New York director from crafting a film that does not escape the dichotomic tension dear to his cinema and filmography: the one between the feelings towards the family that Percy is "forced" to leave each time, to the point of feeling like a failure in front of his children, and the drive towards freedom here in the form of the journey, discovery, escape from the "bigotry of the Church," from an England that 4 centuries after the discovery of the new continent still calls Latin American peoples "savages." A freedom that, however, will soon become obsessive and almost selfish compulsion.

Gray could only tell this journey of men through his style. The special effects are essentially zeroed out, and what recreates the pathos of those times is the splendid photography, as accurate as few others in films about the Amazon. By taking his time, Gray also has the opportunity to write a solid enough screenplay to support a very complex film. Never forgetting to balance the emotionality and visual architecture of the staging, the verisimilitude, and the historical reconstruction. The finale is deeply symbolic and closes the circularity of the film, in Percy’s journey and his personal quest, beyond hypothetical civilizations. Perhaps Percy was simply seeking his destiny.

Unspectacular, classic, timeless, "past," auteur epic, niche "Hollywood." "The Lost City of Z" is the pinnacle of James Gray's career, the film that makes me retract the final consideration I made for "C'era una volta a New York", when I didn't think he was capable of creating a film that could endure in the years to come. His latest film is a small gem of cinema that tries to withstand, touching the pathos reached by the great classics of the past. Indeed, it passed completely under the radar.