Unforgivable Bastardization of Actual Events

Rating: 3/10 (31 December 2017)

If a viewer didn't read anything about the actual adventurer Percy Fawcett and his experiences exploring the Amazon jungle in the early part of the 20th Century, "The Lost City of Z" would probably strike him as a pretty decent historical adventure with some good central performances and a welcome message about embracing little known cultures that gives it a sense of relevancy in our current cultural climate. But if one reads even a little about the real Fawcett and his attitudes, this film becomes an unbearable concoction that takes a complicated story and character and turns it into yet another white male savior story, one that is totally tone deaf to conversations happening in the real world at this moment.
Percy Fawcett was a bigot who pretty much abandoned his family for his megalomaniacal obsessions, and he had so much trouble reconciling the actual Amazonian natives he found with the preconceived notions he had of them in his head (in other words, they weren't as savage as he wanted them to be) that he invented the theory that a race of "white" natives emigrated to the Amazon first and created a new race. But in the movie, Fawcett, as played by Charlie Hunnam, is fascinated with the people of the Amazon and advocates for them in the face of obstinate English attitudes about white European supremacy. And his family, particularly his wife, played by Sienna Miller, maybe once in a while misses him, but mostly are proud and supportive of his exploits. In the real story, Fawcett left his family destitute and they had to live a nomadic existence, moving from her to there in an effort to scrape together the means of subsistence.
I'm the last person to demand that movies based on historical events be rigidly faithful, and I'm comfortable with dramatic license. But there are limits, especially when the director and writer chooses to focus his story on race during such a racially charged moment in history. James Gray has defended himself by saying that he wanted to focus on Fawcett's accomplishments rather than his faults, and that if he had been portrayed as the ass that it sounds like he was audiences wouldn't have been able to see past that. To which I say, "Why don't you let your audience figure that out for themselves?" Instead, he decides to condescendingly give us the version of the story he wishes had existed, as if the people going to see it don't know how to look things up on Google, and doesn't give us the chance to digest a more complex version of events for ourselves. Where is Werner Herzog when you need him?
This is by no means a badly made movie, and in many ways is actually a well made one, but its casual distortion of history prevents me from being able to give it a high rating or recommend it to anyone.
Grade: C-