Jungle

Movie, 2017, R

Premise – A trio of backpackers who have found themselves wandering through South America are offered the opportunity to explore the Bolivian jungle with a mysterious tour guide, who claims to know the uncharted land and can lead them to an undiscovered tribe of natives. This is the true life story of Yossi Ghinsberg, who falls off of their handmade raft during their adventure, and gets lost in the Bolivian jungle for 19 days.

Review – I had extraordinarily low expectations for this film, so it ended up being quite enjoyable. I expected an incredibly gritty, gory, disgustingly off-putting film, so I was confused when I saw the film was rated R only for language, and not disturbing imagery. As it turns out, there’s not that much gross-ness in the film as was advertised. There are really two to three scenes to look out for, two of them involving gross feet, and one of them involving a worm stuck in Yossi's head. The feet, however, were shown in the trailer, and the worm scene was discussed in just about every interview, so I was already prepared. Because of this, I could just enjoy the film and not sit in agony with my eyes half open, fearing for blood. I'd encourage the same from other watchers, as it is fair to know that this is a relatively safe watch.

I watched this film for Daniel Radcliffe, as I have seen every single one of his films and immensely enjoy the creativity of his taste. Yossi is Israeli, so we hear Daniel Radcliffe performing a new accent we’ve never heard him have before. He also has a spray tan, because no way anybody would look that pale in South America. He is in his best shape at the beginning of the film, but then loses about 15 pounds by the end, so we see him go through a jarring physical transformation as well. Daniel really threw himself into this role, as no one asked him to starve himself, but he felt his acting could not be genuine if he didn’t. So if nothing else, I'm happy to watch this film just because I'm so enamored by his work.

The scenic imagery was beautiful, the music was beautiful, the acting was beautiful… but the film just didn’t hold together thematically as well as I would hope. There are two ways you can go about a survival film. One is the gritty version, where you display everything that happens incredibly realistically. The other is the psychological version, where you instead focus on the internal suffering and get creative with hallucinations and delusions. This film really struggled to balance between those two directions and got lost in between, so that the realism of the film didn’t seem strong enough, and the delusions somewhat pointless. 

The trailers gave the tagline “Man does not belong here,” though one of the themes of the film was that once you stop seeing the world as man vs. nature, and more how man fits into nature, then your suffering lessens. However, this theme wasn’t hammered into the film as clearly as I would have liked, and I would not have necessarily picked up on it had it not been for watching interviews. But I did really like the theme. The jungle was not the enemy, nor were the indigenous people. Their way of live was just different, where man-made protections are removed - the same man-made protections that remove us from the reality of how we fit into the world. Despite all of the suffering, there was a real appreciation for the beauty of where Yossi was. (56/100)
 

What to watch for – I should have known he’d show up naked in this film somewhere. He never talked about it, but somehow he ends up naked in just about every film. We see his entire backside yet again. (See December Boys, Equus, Kill Your Darlings, What If, Horns, and Swiss Army Man for more naked Daniel Radcliffe, because he gets naked a lot somehow).

If you liked this movie, I'd recommend Titanic! I know that sounds odd...

 
Director: Greg McLean
Original memoir by Yossi Ghinsberg