Fitzcarraldo

Rewatching this in the theater is just about as good as it gets. Besides the guy next to me cranking Pink Floyd in his headphones and the guy behind me coughing all his Covid on my back, it was an awesome experience (I moved before the movie began to avoid these shenanigans).  Also I was a bit bummed that this is the dubbed version, but was low key glad I didn’t have to read this time around. This movie’s main character of Fitzgerald, who is referred to as Fitzcarradlo because of the accents of the people of Peru is eccentric, ambitious, and on a mission by Devine right to put an Opera house in the middle of the Amazon. This ambitious and eccentric drive mirrors the movie’s creator, Herzog, to the outlandish mission to bring this story to life. It’s hard to talk about this movie without talking about how it was made. Over the course of 5 years in the Amazon forest, 300 miles away from any civilization, an entire documentary, Burden of Dreams, is about bringing this movie to life. The main feat of the movie is moving a 300 ton steamship over a Mile of mountain, using an ancient pulley system. This is both done in the movie and in real life, giving such catharsis when it happens, that it far exceeds the scale and scope of anything using CGI to do the heavy lifting. But this isn’t all about a boat over the mountain. It’s about art and dreams. The way this man puts on Opera music, and stands there stiffly, just scanning the room to make sure everyone else is enjoying it too is too funny. Leading up to this expedition, you see everyone tell him it is impossible and doubt him every step of the way, even his entire crew leaves him not too far into the journey. With a singleminded mission, and any means to accomplish it, this draws parallels to Ahab and Moby Dick in the depiction of madness. Everything about this movie is madness, but it is so controlled and precise and hilarious that it hits on all fronts for me. The style of this is amazing too, being for sure a slow burn, clocking in at 2:40. But the immersion is next level, with so many shots of feeling that you are a passenger on the boat, or a native looking up at this behemoth, then getting obscured by trees. Some other standouts are the crew member core that stayed: the captain, mechanic, and chef are all great characters and unique (the captain reminding me of Starbuck and mechanic of Queequeg from Moby Dick as well). All in all, this is probably the most ambitious movie ever along with Apocalypse Now and Sorcerer. The scope is massive, but the depiction and character study is precise and genius. I found it even better the second time around.