'Lost City' isn't the big Cuban epic it wants to be

Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News

Published May 26, 2006 at midnight

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Before the premiere of his new movie at September's Telluride Film Festival, Andy Garcia brought an enormous cast of actors on stage. It was clear that Garcia wanted us to understand the level of commitment and pride that had gone into making Lost City, a movie that looks back on the time when Cuba was undergoing immense upheaval.

Garcia, who arrived in the U.S. from Cuba when he was 5, has made an ode to what he views as a squandered, tragic moment in Cuban history, the rise of Fidel Castro. By the time Lost City has concluded, we've seen how revolutionary zeal can shred family loyalties and how impulses to do good can be easily perverted.

Worthy points all - and clearly representative of Garcia's deepest convictions - but the actor, who's making his directorial debut here, doesn't bring much by way of subtlety to his themes, and the whole business comes off as a hackneyed approximation of an epic.

Perhaps because he felt a heavy weight of responsibility in telling a story that's both personal and political, Garcia brings a big sensibility to a family story. As a result, Lost City can feel like a highlight reel or an extended trailer.

On the surface, Lost City shimmers with possibility. The Fellove family is fractured in ways that mirror divisions within Cuban society. Dad is a college professor, family patriarch and sober observer of the Cuban scene. One of his sons, Fico (Garcia), owns a nightclub and tends to be apolitical, a man who prizes family above all else.

Fico's brothers (Enrique Murciano and Nestor Carbonell) have turned against dictator Fulgencio Batista, each in a different way. After one of the brother's wives (Ines Astre) is widowed, she becomes romantically involved with Fico, setting up a story in which love and a woman's devotion to the new Cuba come into sharp conflict.

For all its dramatic huffing and puffing, the most enjoyable thing about Garcia's overly long movie is the fine, nostalgic aura with which Garcia re-creates Havana's entertainment scene circa 1950. Garcia wrote some of the movie's music.

Garcia also co-wrote the script with G. Cabrera Infante, the late Cuban critic and screenwriter, which makes it all the more surprising that Lost City doesn't work either as great pulp entertainment or as an inflamed act of political gainsaying.

The film clearly is anti-Castro, as was Infante, but The Lost City looks at history through a narrow lens, the plight of the affluent Felloves. And when the movie does expand, it's in bizarre ways: Garcia makes room for some weird bits of casting that seem to bounce into the movie like errant beach balls from someone else's day at the beach.

Dustin Hoffman shows up as gangster Meyer Lansky, and Bill Murray portrays an expatriate American whose only function seems to be to deliver mordant one-liners. He's doing stand-up in the middle of history.And that's just where the movie is stranded - in the middle of history. Somewhere amid the bric-a-brac - hot rhythms, ocean breezes and political upheaval and melodrama - a movie languishes. Garcia never really finds it.

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