The Lost City
With Garcia, Steven Bauer, Richard Bradford, Nestor Carbonell, Lorena Feijoo, Bill Murray, Dustin Hoffman, Tomas Milan, and William Marquez
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Sixteen years ago Garcia decided he wanted to adapt Cabrera Infante’s unadaptable, pun-packed, joyfully multicultural Three Trapped Tigers, an epic about Havana nightclub life during the late Batista period. Garcia’s dream kept mutating, and Cabrera Infante wound up writing a gargantuan screenplay with an entirely new story line. As Garcia tried to get financing, the script kept getting whittled down, and the result is The Lost City, the only evidence of what the original might have been like. This raises the same kind of questions as A.I. Artificial Intelligence, whose 40-page precis, as commissioned by Stanley Kubrick, was realized by Steven Spielberg only after Kubrick died. Garcia says Cabrera Infante saw the finished film before he died but doesn’t say what he thought of it. It’s especially hard to imagine how he responded to the grotesque representation of himself, a strained comic part played by Bill Murray (Garcia’s real-life golfing buddy). Until I read it in the press book I had no idea that Murray, in his mock-jock persona, was supposed to evoke Cabrera Infante, who was given to dandyish dress and constructed a literary image that photographs show was Victorian and Edwardian, like the Anglophilic enthusiasms of Jorge Luis Borges.
Cabrera Infante had a nuanced sense of how the Cuban revolution soured, not a simplistic set of cold war reflexes–his criticism of the idealized radical icon Che Guevara is a lot more complicated than this film’s. His parents founded the communist party in his hometown, Gibara, and he was a leading intellectual in Castro’s Havana before being sent to Brussels as a cultural attache; four years later he settled permanently in London. But the only clear signs of his wit and intellect in The Lost City are in the moral ambiguities that surround the appearances of American gangster Meyer Lansky (a cameo by Dustin Hoffman) and in the film’s final title.
