Peter Weir’s version of Paul Theroux’s The
Mosquito Coast certainly supports a lively dialogue on its merits as
literary adaptation, and on the wisdom of even having tried, while almost
entirely failing on its own ambitious terms. Harrison Ford plays Allie Fox, a
sporadically brilliant, quasi-tyrannical under-achiever whose disgust with the condition
of America leads him to take off with his wife and four children to a remote
part of South America, where he sets out to transform a broken-down jungle
outpost into a high-functioning community reflecting his own principles. Taken
at face value, the narrative presents us with a series of absurdities (all the less
palatable for their white-saviorism); for example, arriving at their wretched
destination with almost no initial resources on hand, the family systematically imposes the desired order, dominated by a massive,
technologically adventurous ice-making machine, during all of which the four
young kids don’t appear to age a single day. The film lacks the sense of
obsession or immersion that might have allowed it to blast through such reservations
(Werner Herzog is impossible to ignore as a reference point; Apocalypse Now comes
to mind several times as well), and Ford, in theory an inspired piece of
imaginative casting, seldom provides an appropriately charismatic (or even very
engaged-seeming) focal point (the mostly unquestioning compliance of Fox’s wife
also seems to require greater investigation than the book provides, when embodied in the form of Helen
Mirren). Some aspects of the film do benefit a bit from hindsight;
for instance, our greater attunement to climate change and sustainability now
adds an extra charge to the dark irony of Allie’s icemaker ultimately becoming a source
of environmental chaos. But overall, there’s very little the film does
adequately, even failing to make much of the rich surrounding landscape in all
its possibility and threat.
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