Old Yorker

  • The Lost City of Z

    Old YorkerFilm review

     James Gray (2017)

    An article by the Canadian explorer John Hemming has just appeared on the Spectator website with the heading, ‘The Lost City of Z is a very long way from a true story – and I should know’.  The sub-heading reads:  ‘A new Hollywood film hypes Percy Fawcett as a great explorer.  In fact, he was a racist incompetent who achieved very little’.  The piece makes clear the liberties that James Gray’s film takes with the facts of Fawcett’s life, especially the details of his several expeditions to find an ancient lost Amazonian city, which Fawcett believed to have been inhabited by a civilisation exceptionally advanced for its time.  On the last of these expeditions, in 1925, Fawcett, by then approaching sixty, was accompanied by his elder son, Jack; both disappeared without trace.  John Hemming concludes that the fundamental problem is David Grann’s 2009 book The Lost City of Z, the primary source of James Gray’s script:  ‘… Grann hyped the story out of all proportion and wrongly depicted Fawcett as a great explorer  … Hollywood believed everything Grann wrote, and then hyped it up more’.   It’s amazing to a viewer like me who’d never heard of Percy Fawcett that what’s been put on screen is an artificially colourful treatment of its subject.  Gray’s picture seems conscientious and is formidably boring.

    Until 1906, when he first travelled to South America, Percy Fawcett was a career soldier and, according to the film, a somewhat thwarted one.  The opening scenes of The Lost City of Z – set in 1905 in Cork, where the protagonist is currently stationed – are mildly promising.  On a dynamically-filmed deer hunt, it’s Major Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) who shoots and kills the quarry yet he’s virtually shunned at the hunt ball that takes place that evening.  When one elderly chap (David Calder) asks another (a surprisingly cast Murray Melvin) why the deerslayer isn’t on the top table, the answer is that Fawcett ‘made a rather unfortunate choice of ancestors’.  The early conversations between Percy and his wife Nina (Sienna Miller) convey her keen frustration that her husband hasn’t received what she considers his military just deserts.  But the Irish prologue also supplies hints that a more generic kind of life-story-telling is in the offing.  After three-year-old Jack (Tom Mulheron) has witnessed his father’s triumph in the hunt, Percy tells his excited infant son, with biopic clairvoyance, ‘One day, you and I will hunt together …’   When they eventually go to the Amazon, they themselves become the prey of hunters.  Jack (now Tom Holland: the intervening seven-year-old boy is played, in a brief appearance, by Billy Smalldridge) fears they’re about to be killed by native ‘savages’ but Percy tells him calmly that, ‘Whatever happens is our destiny’.  That kind of remark in this kind of film is always meant to be totally reassuring, though I’m not sure why.

    Fawcett first goes to South America on a frontier-surveying assignment on behalf of the Royal Geographical Society, the RGS having been commissioned by the Bolivian government to act as an impartial third party in mapping an area on the border of Brazil and Bolivia, at what John Hemming calls ‘the height of the great Amazon rubber boom’.  At this point, Fawcett enters uncharted territory within the Bolivian jungle and James Gray familiar terrain for a based-on-a-true-adventure-story narrative:  the ‘dramatic’ incidents and conflicts between characters that follow are just what you’d expect.  The film stays put in this terrain for the next two hours – except for the odd aberrant sequence, such as an exchange between Fawcett and an almost hysterically animated RGS audience, to which he first makes public his belief in Z.   The hero interrupts his exploring to resume soldiering, during the Great War; the trench warfare scenes have the perfunctory quality of an interlude.  Two other, related things lend the film a kind of distinctiveness:  Gray accentuates the negative more than a mainstream Hollywood director of yesteryear would likely have done, and Charlie Hunnam’s performance in the lead makes Fawcett appear dutifully dogged rather than flamboyantly obsessive in his quest.  I guess it’s the combination of predictability and earnestness that has led some admirers of The Lost City of Z to describe it as ‘classical’ big-picture cinema à la David Lean.  It was a combination of the last letter of the alphabet and wishful thinking that Gray’s film might get entertaining which kept linking Fawcett’s lost city in my mind with the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz.

    Charlie Hunnam’s facial expressions are occasionally expressive; vocally, he’s not only colourless but always sounds like an actor reading lines – usually with forced elocution.  He is, and looks, younger than Fawcett was even in 1905 although Hunnam’s aging make-up is good.  Twenty-year-old Tom Holland is actually the right age to play Jack Fawcett (who was twenty-two when he accompanied his father on the last, doomed expedition) but he’s weirdly more effective as an adolescent – as an adult, his voice sounds barely to have broken.  Robert Pattinson, though he sometimes looks to be trying to hide behind a large beard, manages to get a bit of individuality into the part of Fawcett’s long-standing aide-de-camp.   Clive Francis and Ian McDiarmid do well as RGS bigwigs.  The Amazonian jungle is no place for a woman, of course.  This is a pity, because Sienna Miller’s acting is freer and more communicative than anyone else’s, even though the loyal-wife-cum-feisty-woman-ahead-of-her time role she’s playing is weakly contrived.

    28 March 2017

  • Another Mother’s Son

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Christopher Menaul (2017)

    I went along knowing only the basic scenario and that Another Mother’s Son was based on a true story from World War II – of a Jersey widow and mother, who hides an escaped Russian prisoner-of-war from the occupying German forces.  I didn’t know the ending of the story but assumed it would be a happy one.   Christopher Menaul’s film turns out to be so thoroughly a type of British home-front war drama – a tribute to family ties and up-against-it community spirit, going to church and making tea – that watching it increases this preconceived sense of security.  The picture’s supposedly wrenching moments, of which there are plenty, are circumscribed and softened by confidence that all will finally be well.  The Nazi authorities sentence Louisa Gould to two years in prison for harbouring the Russian, and she’s required to serve her time in Germany.   It’s startling to see Louisa scrabbling for bread in a truckload of other prisoners but, when the truck doors close, the scene fades out and a ‘May 1945’ legend takes its place on the screen, I was primed for her heartwarming, tear-jerking return to Jersey, gaunt but heroically vindicated.  Instead, Christopher Menaul cuts to Ravensbrück concentration camp and a pile of discarded spectacles onto which is tossed a pair that we recognise as Louisa’s.  Another legend then informs us that she died in Ravensbrück in early 1945, a few weeks before the camp was liberated.  The effect of this final revelation is not only shocking but utterly disorienting.  The film I’d been watching wasn’t one that could end this way.

    The effect isn’t, however, chastening – not for long anyway – because Christopher Menaul and the screenwriter Jenny Lecoat (who is Louisa Gould’s great-niece) encourage viewers ignorant of the biographical facts to make complacent assumptions.  The film-makers do so not as a long-term disarming strategy but, it seems, from lack of imagination.  Louisa, who ran a grocery store in St Ouen on Jersey, sheltered Feodor Polycarpovitch Burriy, whom she names Bill, from 1942 until her arrest in 1944.  It’s only too easy to believe that both must have spent these two years continuously on tenterhooks; that Louisa’s kindness and bravery, and the friendship that developed between her and Bill, must always have been overshadowed by fear; that the happy, sociable moments – Louisa’s close family also know about her house guest – were more than counterbalanced by alarming ones.   The film’s pattern of rapidly alternating up-and-down incidents doesn’t capture this underlying precarious quality, though:  it’s drama by numbers.  You keep wanting to tell Mario Grigorov’s stating-the-obvious score it has no need to keep making points that you’ve already got.

    In spite of the familiarity of its tone and structure, Another Mother’s Son doesn’t seem, in some respects, like the work of a director as experienced as Christopher Menaul.   I guess this is a matter of editing but there are scenes where it’s unusually obvious that the actors have started performing on a shout of ‘Action!’  Bill, on the run before he’s taken in by Louisa, rushes panting up a hillside – Julian Kostov, the actor playing him, is evidently acting being out of breath.  The same thing happens, and more crucially, in Louisa’s final appearance, in the camp-bound truck, as Jenny Seagrove tears at the piece of bread that comes her way.  This moment expresses Seagrove’s overall approach to a role bigger and more emotionally extenuating than you expect to see this actress playing – she all too obviously grabs hold of it with both hands.  Although I’m not sure how how Jersey natives sound, the collection of accents in evidence is a bit weird.    While Jenny Seagrove is sometimes straining to be verging-on-Cockney ordinary, Ronan Keating, who plays Louisa’s brother Harold, disguises his Irish accent under a severely clipped RP English one (the pretext is presumably that Harold is more highly educated than his sister).  Perhaps Louisa’s brother-in-law Arthur was a Scot but that doesn’t quite explain why John Hannah’s own Scottish accent comes and goes throughout.

    Yet the story and these actors’ palpable respect for the people they’re playing make Another Mother’s Son engaging and touching.  Both Louisa Gould’s sons fought in World War II; as soon as Louisa learns that one of them has been killed in action, the viewer who knows what’s coming starts to wonder how the bereavement will affect the subsequent relationship between Louisa and another mother’s son.  In the event, Christopher Menaul and Jenny Seagrove do well to keep you aware of this element without pushing it too hard (except when Louisa says to Bill one evening that ‘in this light’ he looks like her dead son …)  Louisa’s other son survived the war and his mother; so too did Feodor Burri.  It’s clear from the closing photographs of the real-life people concerned that the actual Burri didn’t have Julian Kostov’s cover-boy looks but Kostov, who’s Bulgarian, also has warmth and humour, and is very likeable.  Amanda Abbington does some good work as Louisa’s sister, Ivy.   The cast also includes Nicholas Farrell, Susan Hampshire, Peter Wight and, as two old biddies who seem the most likely authors of the anonymous letters to the authorities that cause them to search Louisa’s home, Joanna David and Gwen Taylor.

    The German occupation of the Channel Islands has inspired stage and screen dramas before.  Examples include William Douglas-Home’s theatre play The Dame of Sark, adapted for television in 1976; the Guernsey-set series Enemy at the Door, which ran on ITV between 1978 and 1980; and, on the big screen, a 1951 movie called Appointment with Venus, whose fictional setting is based on Sark, and The Eagle Has Landed (1977), which includes an episode in Alderney.    If Wikipedia is to be believed, however, it seems that Another Mother’s Son is a cinema first in commemorating the heroism of  particular, extraordinary Jersey residents of the time.  In 2010, Louisa Gould was named a ‘British Hero of the Holocaust’; the film’s closing legends record that her brother Harold Le Druillenec, also imprisoned in Germany for his part in harbouring Feodor Burriy, was the sole British survivor to return from Bergen-Belsen.

    Although Another Mother’s Son is no great shakes, the condescending view expressed by some British critics that it’s no better than ‘television’ comes across as lazily out of date.  It may be especially vexing to Christopher Menaul, who’s directed three previous cinema features but whose CV includes much more television.  (His work includes the 2002 mini-series of The Forsyte Saga and, in 2006, Granada’s See No Evil: The Moors Murders, written by Neil McKay and whose strong cast included George Costigan, Joanne Froggatt, Matthew McNulty, Maxine Peake and Sean Harris, in a remarkable  and memorable interpretation of Ian Brady.)  At a time when we repeatedly hear that television is displacing cinema as the home of original, quality drama, what does it mean for Angie Errigo in The List to condemn Another Mother’s Son as ‘having the unmistakable air of a middling ITV3 drama’, and for the Independent‘s Geoffrey Macnab to disparage Menaul’s film as ‘more like a TV movie than anything cinematic’?    In 2017, what, on this side of the Atlantic at least, is a ‘TV movie’?  These critics need to get out less.

    25 March 2017

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