There are many reasons to appreciate Martin Scorsese’s latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, and one of them is that it tells a true story from the past that has been not accidentally forgotten but deliberately memory-holed by a culture that does not want to confront the awful reality of it.
A similar such story, though one that is overall much lighter, is 2017’s The Lost City of Z, about late-19th/early-20th-century British explorer Percy Fawcett. Like Flower Moon, this is also based on a book by journalist David Grann. It’s not an action movie but an adventure of the intellect and of the heart, one more about the journey than the destination. Fawcett (played by Charlie Hunnam, with a terrific assist from Robert Pattinson as his aide-de-camp) was obsessed with the Amazonian jungles, with its peoples and its rich history, and it was there that he disappeared without a trace in 1925.
I wondered, back in my 2017 review, why we’ve so thoroughly forgotten a man who was an inspiration for both Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World and Indiana Jones. It seemed to me that he should be enjoying a status of legend on a par with Ernest Shackleton or Amelia Earhart. But it suddenly occurs to me, in the wake of Flower Moon, that is was Fawcett’s championing of the Amazonian peoples that practically guaranteed his work and his ideas would be all but buried: he scandalized British scientific society with his insistence that those whom others saw as “savages” were human beings worthy of dignity and respect, and that Amazonia had once been home to a grand civilization that long predates the British empire.
Clearly, such insults had to be quashed. And now we can thank Grann and writer-director James Gray for reminding us that the hoary cliché that people of the past didn’t know any better, had no context for what we would today consider progressive thinking, is utter horseshit.
US: stream on Prime; rent/buy on Apple TV
UK: stream on Netflix and Studiocanal Presents (via Prime and Apple TV); rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
See The Lost City of Z at Letterboxd for more viewing options.
