"The Lost City": From Garcia, the film project of a lifetime
Knowing that Andy Garcia invested 16 years into the making of "The Lost City," you want to give his labor of love the benefit of the doubt. This melancholy ode to pre-Castro Cuba is 30 minutes too long, and its "intimately epic" story lacks focus as its characters struggle to reconcile Cuba's violent reality with the idealized Cuba they hold in their memories.
It's a movie stretched too thin by Garcia's ambition. As director, star and native Cuban (he immigrated to America when he was 5 years old), Garcia's too close to the sprawling screenplay (by the late Cuban writer and film critic G. Cabrera Infante) to make the difficult editorial decisions that experienced filmmakers know must be made.
"The Lost City," with Andy Garcia, Bill Murray, Inés Sastre, Dustin Hoffman and Nestor Carbonell. Directed by Andy Garcia, from a screenplay by G. Cabrera Infante. 143 minutes. Rated R for violence. Guild 45th.
And yet, for these very reasons, "The Lost City" is a captivating drama. It boldly invites comparison to "Casablanca" and "The Godfather, Part II" while bearing closer resemblance to Francis Ford Coppola's "The Cotton Club," another film defined by music, dance, vibrant culture and a forgivable degree of directorial indulgence.
Garcia plays Fico Fellove, Havana's answer to Rick Blaine, whose El Tropico nightclub is a nexus for all things good and bad about pre-Castro Cuba in the late 1950s. As Batista's dictatorial regime is crumbling under revolutionary pressure, American mobster Meyer Lansky (Dustin Hoffman) coerces Fico with business proposals he'd rather avoid. Fico's family is torn between revolutionary zeal and the vanishing status quo, and a mysterious character known only as The Writer (played by Bill Murray and modeled after Infante) serves as Fico's sardonic counsel amidst chaos.
Newsreel footage provides fleeting historical context as Fico falls for his brother's widow, played with old-school glamour by supermodel Inés Sastre. And while "The Lost City" — resourcefully shot in the Dominican Republic — mostly avoids the wooden melodrama of Sydney Pollack's "Havana," it holds your attention with fine acting, noteworthy highlights (especially a well-executed raid on Batista's fortress), impressive use of an inadequate budget, and the palpable sense of loss as Fico flees to America.
As a musical fever dream of paradise lost, "The Lost City" is a flawed success, boasting just enough truth and admirable purpose to justify the hazards of Garcia's passion.
Jeff Shannon: j.sh@verizon.net