Failure and The Lost City of Z

I am interested in failure when it comes to movies, especially for projects where the expectations are high. What causes something with big stars or a huge budget or the finest production values to just tank? And what does it mean for a film to fail anyway?  We all know films that failed at the box office but that we love and would watch over and over again. And we all know there are films that have made a kajillion dollars but are still stone-cold garbage burgers to watch.

Anyway, in my ruminations on filmic failure, I’ll sometimes seek out a movie that tanked financially just to see if I can spot what the problem was. To this end, I recently watched 2016’s The Lost City of Z, directed by James Gray and starring former Sons of Anarchy lead, Charlie Hunnam. The film is based on the true story of Percy Fawcett, a British military man who explored sections of South America, sometimes for the Royal Geographical Society to create maps, sometimes to find a mythical golden city, a lost civilization in the green desert of the Amazon jungle. 

 The film cost 30 million to make and made 17 million in theaters. Barely over half. While it had a modest budget for a Hollywood film, only making back half of any investment is generally considered failure with a capitol F.

So what went wrong? Why did this handsome looking film based on a New York Times bestselling book fail to draw in audiences? Why did it have no legs?

With something as complicated and multi-faceted as big budget Hollywood filmmaking, it’s difficult to nail down exactly one cause for things like this, but looking at the film on its own, it seems The Lost City of Z had problems both with its script and its casting.

First of all, it is a story of obsession. Despite popular opinion at the time, Fawcett was convinced this lost civilization existed and would write a new chapter in human history. And he was willing to endure profound physical hardship as well as years away from his own family in order prove it. When he’s injured fighting in World War I, even though he’s survived a chorine gas attack and he’s safely reunited with his loving family, when he’s told he may not be well enough to return to the Amazon, that’s when Fawcett breaks down in tears. The problem is that the script never really makes the motivation for his obsession clear. It never transcends the narrative and becomes anything more than “This happened and then this happened and then this happened.” So the script fails to compel because we don’t really know why the main character does what he does beyond the obvious, stated reasons. The film tells rather than shows.

Second, Charlie Hunnam was just not the right guy. He’s British, he’s handsome, he sports a series of fantastic very proper-looking early 20^th century mustaches, but at no point do you really care about what happens to him or believe his compulsion to press through the green hell of unexplored Amazonia. He looks the part but his performance is surface-only.

If there’s a third problem with the film, it’s the source material itself. The non-fiction book its based on is all about journalist David Grann’s failed attempt to find out whatever happened to Fawcett after he disappeared on his final expedition. The ambiguity of the unknown is a big part of what makes the book fascinating, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into an effective film story. The film leaves Grann and the 21^st century out of it altogether and tries to create an ending where there really was none.

So while it had all appearances of a polished, prestige project, The Lost City of Z, proves that without the right script or actors, appearances can clearly be deceiving.