Fitzcarraldo (1982) - film review

In the late 19th Century, Brian Fitzgerald has a dream – to build a grand opera house in Iquitos, a thriving new city inhabited by the nouveaux riches of Peru.  Fitzgerald, known to the local poor as Fitzcarraldo, has no money to realise his dream so he decides to get rich in the same way as his peers, by leasing a parcel of the Amazon jungle and harvesting rubber with indigen labour.  The only land that has not yet been claimed is in region in the south of the country, made inaccessible by dangerous rapids.   Fitzgerald sees an alternative route to the land, which involves traversing an adjacent river and then climbing over a small area of mountain to the river on the other side.  Only a genius or a madman could have conceived such a scheme.  In the first place, the river Fitzgerald intends to travel down is home to Indians who are hostile to all strangers.  Then, assuming he and his crew manage to evade being captured and having their heads shrunk, Fitzgerald must find a way of pulling his 320 ton steamboat up a forty degree incline of mountain rock.  Despite the enormity of the undertaking, Fitzgerald is confident he will succeed...

Ten years after his first Amazonian adventure, Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972), director Werner Herzog made a return visit to the jungles of South America to undertake an even more ambitious enterprise, one that only he could have conceived, let alone realised.   Today, no film director would flinch at the idea of portraying a three storey steamship being dragged up a mountainside, not when there are special effects gurus who merely have to tap a few coordinates into a desktop computer.  In 1981, computer generated effects were but a twinkle in Bill Gates’ eye and the only options open to Herzog then were either to use model shots or to shoot the thing for real.   Any sane director would have done the former.  Herzog opted for the latter course.  What he accomplished was to be one of the most miraculous artistic and technical achievements in cinema history, but that doesn’t prevent it from being utterly and irredeemably bonkers.

As if the ordeal of heaving a 300 ton ship up a mountainside was not enough to contend with, Herzog and his crew faced other challenges.   Almost halfway into the shooting schedule, the lead actor Jason Robards fell seriously ill and had to abandon the project.  He was replaced with Klaus Kinski, with whom Herzog had worked on three earlier films, notably the aforementioned Aguirre.  Kinski was not the easiest of actors to work with and once again Herzog had difficulty coping with his tantrums.  Kinski also upset the local Indians, to the point that they threatened to kill him.  Herzog, ever the pragmatist, declined the offer to have his lead actor murdered, although the prospect must have been tempting.  Mick Jagger was also to have appeared in the film, but he pulled out when Herzog went back to restart the shoot with his new lead actor.  

One of Werner Herzog’s undisputed masterpieces, Fitzcarraldo is a work that celebrates both the importance of art in our lives and the resilience of the human spirit in the face of overwhelming adversity.  Although the central character doesn’t get to realise his dream in quite the way he had imagined, his failure does not diminish the immensity of what he did achieve, and in that respect the film is a metaphor for life.  What matters is not the outcome but the endeavour.   Beautifully crafted and intensely poetic in its narrative simplicity, Fitzcarraldo is a spellbinding work that, with breathtaking bravado, shows the extraordinary power of the imagination.

© James Travers 2009

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