The Lost City
The Lost City
Directed by: Andy Garcia
Written by: Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Starring: Garcia, Inés Sastre, Bill Murray, Enrique Murciano, Nestor Carbonell, Dustin Hoffman
At: Kendall Square
Running time: 143 minutes Rated: R (violence)
''The Lost City" is Andy Garcia's ballad to Havana during the Cuban revolution. You'll have to forgive the penthouse view, though -- it's the only one Garcia can seem to find, and that privileged vantage point does afford an entertainingly ridiculous glimpse of one affluent family that falls apart as the country does.
This is Garcia's directing debut, and at two hours and 23 minutes, it aims to be epic. Yet it's the sort of epic that aspires to tell Cuba's modern political history and celebrate its people without introducing us to a single believable character. It's a family saga you can dance to. As one jolly elder gentleman declares mere minutes into the proceedings, ''My kingdom for a cha-cha-cha." Indeed.
Garcia casts himself as Fico Fellove, the smooth, extremely well-connected owner and manager of El Tropico, a hot nightclub in late-1950s Havana. Fico is a busy man. For one thing, he's fighting to keep his family together. But the changing political tide is really doing a number on his two younger brothers: Ricardo (Enrique Murciano) runs off, sprouts a beard, and joins Castro's revolution, while Luis (Nestor Carbonell), who's much more direct, personally tries to assassinate the dictator and president Fulgencio Batista (Juan Fernandez). The Fellove patriarch, played by Tomas Milian, in the only resonant performance, is old school: Why should the family flee to America? This revolution business is a fad. It'll pass.
Fico's political ambitions don't appear to extend further than his snazzy ascots. He tries lecturing the volatile Ricardo, but his words come out as testy cookie fortunes. ''What you need," he says, ''is a little evolution, not revolution" -- and something expensive to tie around your neck is always a nice, civilizing touch.
Garcia's filmmaking doesn't delve much deeper. True, he's working with a watery script by novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante that's too restless to do or say much of anything about Cuba's political upheaval other than there was one. But rarely has even a poorly written epic been brought to the screen with such a lack of artistic conviction.
Luis's attempt to take out Batista should have been a thrilling centerpiece. But as Luis and his buddies storm the palace with the sound of gunfire echoing through its halls, Batista prissily sits at his desk with his loyal assistant by his side and asks, ''What is that?" For a moment, it's like watching Mr. Burns snivel at Smithers. That sequence is juxtaposed with the Afro-Cuban dance number (as nearly all the important political passages are) at Fico's club. When Batista finally hightails it out of the country, I was almost overtaken with a wave of envy.
It's unfortunate that ''The Lost City" brings to mind the powerful and eloquent passage in ''The Godfather: Part II" where Michael Corleone goes to Havana for a mob deal intended to suck the island dry before the revolution and winds up seeing a Cuban guerrilla blow himself up. Nothing in Garcia's movie approaches the complicated sense of fatalism and hope in that sequence.
Instead of fraternizing with, heaven forbid, an average Cubano or two, the movie overdoses on Bill Murray, as Fico's American buddy, who stinks up the film with his droll witticisms. We get a gratuitous scene or two with Dustin Hoffman as gangster Meyer Lansky and a torturous love story between Fico and his brother's gorgeous wife (Inés Sastre). And we never do get a clear explanation of why some characters randomly speak Spanish while everyone else in the film talks in perfect English.
Garcia seems to have used every foot of film he was able to shoot. But the only true descriptive scenes of the revolution and its grim events are courtesy of the 30 seconds or so of archival footage. However, Castro's minions do come crashing down on El Tropico in the form of a butch Elizabeth Peña, who outlaws all saxophones.
Her ordinance underscores that we're watching the work of a limousine proletarian. It also brings to mind something Fico observes about Havana's demise. It's ''no longer a capital city," he laments, ''It's a capital sin." You might say the same about what Garcia's done with the place.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
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