Film Secession

Echoes of Virgil in The Lost City of Z (James Gray, 2017)

The Long Voyage Home

As our portrait film makes clear, James Gray has a pronounced, even obsessive, interest in The Odyssey and in the possibility of communicating narrative truths in mythic language. There are two Homeric epic traditions, and the one associated with The Odyssey (generally understood to be later than The Iliad) represents peripatetic wandering, with elements of anti-epic digression.
That would seem markedly different from films as rigorously structured and geographically restricted as Gray's (in several films, the characters barely leave the vicinity of Brighton Beach in Brooklyn). The protracted journeys home of his wayward protagonists have Odyssean elements, however, and these ideas explicitly shape two recent films, The Lost City of Z (2017) and Ad Astra (2019). The former includes a sequence (left) in which the protagonist, appropriately for an early twentieth century British explorer with his education, paraphrases Virgil's The Aeneid about the difficulty of returning from hell. That is an allusion to the linked nekyia sequences in The Odyssey (Book 11) and The Aeneid (Book 6), the underworld journeys that include the summoning up and questioning of ghosts.
Like 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), the science fiction film Ad Astra also makes room for life's deepest mysteries, as evidenced by the St. Christopher prayer that accompanies the start of a space journey (below) and the funeral scene that follows a character's death.
In The Lost City of Z, this also takes musical form. Maurice Ravel's 1912 Daphnis et Chloé Suite (yet another work from the early twentieth century) gives epic force to an intimate family farewell.

Gray on The Odyssey (Chapter Three)

A St. Christopher prayer in Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019)

Maurice Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé Suite (1912) in The Lost City of Z (James Gray, 2017)

Fathers and Sons

Elsewhere in The Lost City of Z, Gray even more boldly uses Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (1913) to accompany the protagonist's journey to Bolivia. Significantly, the music begins just after wandering in partially illuminated tunnels.
Carl Jung saw tunnels as representing the movement into the unconscious, and Gray returns to the imagery in Ad Astra (second clip below). Like Odysseus and Aeneas (and later Dante), Roy has to descend before he can begin to ascend. With characteristic human irony, Gray aligns the epic spatial quest with a much more personal need for familial encounter, keeping everything at disarmingly human scale.
Roy's father is depicted as a cross between the Kurtz of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) and Captain Ahab from Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851). Obsessed with pushing the boundaries of knowledge, he runs up against all-too-human limits of understanding. Characteristically, Gray's resolution takes the form of a gesture that is at once direct, simple, and mythic. The touching hand motif returns at the end of the film as Roy finally completes his Odyssean journey.
Father and son achieve a different sort of union in the final section of The Lost City of Z. They accompany each other along a true journey into the unknown, which combines elements of descent and ascent. The film itself ends, suspended, inside a mirror.