Gray’s version of the story of Fawcett and his wife Nina centers on the magnitude of her sacrifice-years of life alone with three children, ever-dwindling funds, and perpetual anxiety while Fawcett tramps the jungle. The Lost City of Z does say Hollywood, but only some of the time. Making them appears to have required the usual draining ordeal of raising money, struggling over control, coaxing things forward, calling on the Muse for a winning idea, trying not to care about the money, which was never enough, he said recently in an interview with New York magazine, to leave his apartment and buy a house. The mood of these films was shadowed and tense. Gray’s next four films were all set in New York, too, and were seeded with the occasional Hollywood name-Gwyneth Paltrow, Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix. Nothing about that film said Hollywood, but Gray’s eye for grand vistas was evident in shots of the Brooklyn waterfront and of streets below the elevated subway tracks on sunny days. His first film, released in 1994 when he was twenty-five, was Little Odessa, an emotionally spare crime melodrama set among the Russian immigrant community that had settled in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. Gray at first glance might seem an odd choice for such a project. Robert Pattinson and James Gray on the set of The Lost City of Z, 2016 Pitt sent Grann’s book to the director James Gray, who has now, six years later, released a film of dazzling beauty about Fawcett, about rainforests so dense that men must make their way through them in perpetual twilight, about the mad devotion of men to impossible projects as they approach the far end of middle life, and about the deepening mystery of what happened to the cities and the people who had never known small pox and measles when Orellana first appeared among them.
The colonel’s disappearance created its own tangled trail of accumulating rumor and speculation over the years, until it pricked the curiosity of the New Yorker writer David Grann, whose report of what he learned in the course of his own obsessive quest, published in his book The Lost City of Z, fascinated Brad Pitt, the actor and film producer. Yet from that last expedition they never returned. Fawcett was no crackpot but a distinguished geographer and explorer who knew what he was getting into. After the war, Colonel Fawcett went looking for the lost city, which he called “Zed” (or Z), setting out for the last time in 1925 not with a great expedition loaded with fancy gear, but with his son and a school friend of his son-just the three of them. Fawcett, who left the Army with the rank of lieutenant-colonel but was known thereafter by the courtesy title of Colonel. No European ever saw that city again, but report of it from Carvajal and travelers’ tales appeared in old documents and histories of exploration, arousing the attention of ethnologists and treasure hunters, until about the time of the World War I when it swam into the ken of a British surveyor and Army officer with a mid-life hunger for great achievement. But the chronicler of Orellana’s journey, the Dominican priest Gaspar de Carvajal, reported that along the banks of the Amazon in one long section they passed numerous towns and cities including one so immense that there was hardly space to walk between houses for fifteen miles.
Pizarro soon lost hope and retraced his steps back over the Andes, while Orellana, having little choice, followed the ever-widening river for thousands of miles to its mouth.Īfter a century or two men quit looking for the mythical El Dorado and lost interest in the “cinnamon trees,” which, it turned out, were only cousins of the money crop. When the expedition ran short of food, as all Amazon expeditions did, Pizarro sent one of his lieutenants, Francisco de Orellana, downriver in search of Indian villages that might provide corn.
It began to unfold in early 1541 when the Spanish adventurer Gonzalo Pizarro, brother of the conqueror of the Incas in Peru, crossed the Andes into the valleys of the upper Amazon basin in search of the city of El Dorado, ruled by a king said to gild himself with gold dust, and of rumored forests of cinnamon, then one of the world’s leading money crops. The first navigation of the Amazon River by a European may properly be described as an accident. Aidan Monaghan/Amazon Studios/Bleecker StreetĬharlie Hunnam as Percy Fawcett and Tom Holland as Jack Fawcett in James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, 2016