Was she so awful?
A movie in the category of The Lost City of Z (2016) is a little harder to evaluate than most because, as a biography, the story is dictated by the actual events of history. In this case, this is the story of British Army officer Percy Fawcett, dispatched to Bolivia to map the border between Bolivia and Brazil by following a river. At its source, he finds advanced pottery and other signs of an unknown civilization.
Several years later, having returned to his family, he gives a presentation at the Royal Geographic Society on the subject, and proposes a return investigation. Along with his former traveling companions, a Shackleton companion also makes the trip. Another two or three years are spent in travel, only to have the companion become a nuisance and a burden; he is eventually sent back on a horse with an injury. Only after his departure do they find he sabotaged the expedition, although why he’d do such a thing is a little mysterious. The damage is done, and they fail to make it to the head of the river. They return to England, and soon their erstwhile companion shows up, full of brimfire for being abused and abandoned; the dispute is invigorating.
World War I then intervenes, and Fawcett spends several years serving in France, eventually being severely injured by chlorine gas. Upon his recovery, however, the war is finished, and his son persuades him to make one more trip up the river in search of that civilization. They disappear into the forest, and once the letters stop, there is only one more communication received, a wordless message indicating only that success has been achieved. Nothing more is ever heard from them.
Why? Why go the second and third times? Because adventure calls? Because they enjoy risking death by disease or snakebite or hostile natives? Each trip takes several years, and the movie portrays him as deeply attached to his wife in an enlightened relationship – so why virtually abandon the family? One may infer that today’s society would be quite unlike that of the naughts of the 2oth century, but a little work on the motivations of men & women back then would have made the story more engaging.
Those frustrations aside, it’s a technically competent movie, and sometimes the tableaus can be breathtaking, as when they discover an opera in full blast in the middle of the jungle. But the central question of why, why, why? distracts too much from an otherwise fine movie.
