Film Review: 'The Lost City'

[Be sure to check out Mr. Hunter's novel "Havana"...it's one of the Earl Swagger/Bob Lee Swagger tales set in Cuba during the late '50s...I recommend reading these books in order starting with "Point Blank"...they are smart, rousing and blood-drenched yarns...and usually, the correct fella's blood is doing the drenching.]

'Lost City': Halcyon Havana
Andy Garcia's Take On the Revolution Era
By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 19, 2006; Page C05

Nobody remembers pre-revolutionary Havana more clearly than those of us who weren't there. We remember the whores, the gangsters, the dirty movie palace, the spies, the strippers and Havana's Shanghai Theater (actual magazine line: "A Cuban Has Cracked the G-String Barrier.") After all, we all saw "Godfather II" or read Graham Greene's "Our Man in Havana."

But Cubans remember it differently. They remember an elegant Spanish city of grand architecture, crashing surf against the sea wall at the Malecon, the palm trees, the broad boulevards, the pulsating music -- and the families, their own and others, that formed a dense interrelationship of love and rivalry and angst and fear and pity.

Those actual memories are at the heart of Andy Garcia's "The Lost City," a tribute to that time and place, an elegy on what was lost, a little payback for a regime that drove them out, and, best of all, a synthesis of the driving Afro-Cuban rhythms of the extraordinary music.

The big news in the movie will be Garcia's portrait of the young, ruthless, movie-star handsome Che Guevara (Jsu Garcia), so beloved by the American (and world) left. They should know; after all, they saw "The Motorcycle Diaries." Andy Garcia -- an emigre who fled with his parents when he was 5 1/2 -- and the late Cuban novelist-screenwriter G. Cabrera Infante have a different take. They see a punk killer who knows how beautiful he is, how cool, how sexy. He's Mick Jagger with a .45 automatic and plenty of notches in the grip.

Good Lord, what will this do to the T-shirt sales?

But that's only a tiny part of the movie, which is really the story of a family. And the truth is, the movie is pretty fair: It also shows the brutality and corruption of the Batista regime in full frontal frankness, and if it laments the direction that history happens to take, it doesn't question the idea that a change was necessary.

Again, though, that's not the movie, which aspires to be more universal. The model is classic and transcends culture. You can see it in such diverse works as "Fiddler on the Roof" and "Legends of the Fall" and, I suppose, "The Three Little Pigs." It tracks the fate of three siblings across a turbulent era and watches each fate as it transpires, leaving, ultimately, a melancholy survivor lamenting what and who have passed.
The film focuses on the Fellove family. Papa (Tomas Milian) is a college professor but a man of means. They live in a hacienda that could easily be confused with paradise, a vast white house with gardens and servants and billowing curtains at the windows. But they know that change will come: It's 1958 and the Batista government is getting more and more repressive, just as the scruffy rebels are getting more and more bold. Batista had lost the middle class and the aristocrats; he holds only the army. Of course, secret policemen hunt the bad boys in the shadows of the city and the game is played as hard as any revolutionary struggle.

Each brother has a different attitude toward what is happening around them. Fico (Andy Garcia) the eldest, is proprietor of El Tropical, a thinly disguised version of the still extant Tropicana. He is, like so many in show biz, apolitical, as the demands of running the club are so intense they leave him little time for the larger picture. (His profession also gives the movie a platform to offer up almost 40 Cuban songs.) At the same time, he is a traditional Spaniard, who believes in the patriarchal system, and nothing makes him madder than when his two younger brothers disrespect the grave, kind idealist who is their father.

Son No. 2 is Luis (Nestor Carbonell), a pacifist like his father but a man who abhors the politics of now. He yearns for a democratic Cuba but comes to conclude that one man stands between that and reality -- Batista. Thus, he joins the March 13, 1958, assault on Batista's palace by an anti-communist revolutionary group calling itself The Directorio (the details aren't from the movie, but from Hugh Thomas's "Cuba or the Pursuit of Freedom"). Castro had been approached by the group but refused to pitch in; a veteran of an earlier shootout at Moncada Barracks, he sat this one out in the mountains, a wise decision as the attempt ended in failure and massacre. (Even an American tourist got shot by Batista's trigger-happy guards!) "The Lost City's" re-creation of this twisted battle is the most dynamic sequence in the film.

Son No. 3, Ricardo (Enrique Murciano), at least knows which way the wind is blowing. Chastened by the results of that engagement, he joins Castro and soon adds beard and fatigues to his look. Meanwhile, Fico takes it on himself to obey his middle brother's wish and take care of his wife, Aurora (beautiful Ines Sastre), and soon the older brother and the widow have more on their minds than politics.

Some of the tropes of "The Lost City" are ineffective. Bill Murray plays an unnamed "writer" who befriends and hangs out with Fico, offering a comic subtext to all the revolutionary gloom and doom. Murray is always funny and when someone puts him in that forgotten '50s outfit of the short-pants suit, he looks particularly hilarious. He says a lot of things, too, but somehow his character, meant to represent the offbeat stylings of G. Cabrera Infante himself, doesn't quite work.

Then there's Dustin Hoffman in the movie briefly as the famous Meyer Lansky. His is a different version of the character played by Lee Strasberg in "Godfather II," the visionary genius fixer ("Hyman Roth" was the nom de guerre), but again the movie's not about the Cuba of Mafia corruption, sleaze, gangsterism and commercial sex that was at the center of "Godfather II" and more than a few novels. Lansky's appearance, and that plotline, doesn't come to much.

What does work is the sense of loss. Infante finds a brilliant device in the love affair between Fico and Aurora, in that Aurora in some way becomes Cuba. She is absorbed by it and the revolution, and though she loves Fico (who doesn't love a revolution that imparts its discipline on his entertainment enterprise), she cannot tear herself away from a dream of a glorious revolutionary future.

As a director, Garcia's best skill is in evoking great work from his cast, particularly Milian, Murciano, Sastre and Carbonell. They are the heart of the film, the doomed, damned Felloves, victims of the classic wrong time, wrong place tragedy. The movie makes one thing achingly real: the fact that it isn't fun to be born in the cross-hairs of history.

The Lost City (143 minutes, at Landmark's E Street and Bethesda Row) is rated R for violence.