The Land Before GPS

Civilization turns up in the middle of the jungle in The Lost City of Z.

- David Edelstein

FIRST, LET’S BE CLEAR that most of the characters in The Lost City of Z are Brits, which means the Z is pronounced “Zed” rather than “Zee,” you Yankee ignoramus.

Saying “Zed” is important, I think, because it points up the stark contrast between the film’s principal settings: early-20th-century England, which is musty and high-toned and reeking of pretension, and the Amazon jungle, which is verdant and buggy and reeking of decay, both vegetal and human. Early on, the English explorer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) learns that deep in those perilous South American forests there might—might—be the remnants of a lost civilization, the existence of which endangers the unobliging noblesse of his colonialist superiors. (They sent him there to prevent a border war that would threaten the empires of sundry rubber barons.) Surely savages, his countrymen cry, couldn’t have had an advanced culture before the English! For Fawcett, proof of such a city would not only secure his fame and fortune. It would deal a blow to an aristocracy that cast him out after his father’s disgrace. He would advance on the basis of his mettle rather than his ancestry.

The Lost City of Z(ed) was first a book by David Grann, who framed Fawcett’s life as a mystery to be filled in with his own investigation. Director and screenwriter James Gray has opted to tell the story without a mediating modern journalist, inventing what he doesn’t know and changing the dramatic emphasis. Gray’s other films (among them We Own the Night and