The Emerald Forest

#14in my ranking of John Boorman’s films.

John Boorman goes full Luddite. Taking the harrowing real story of a man searching for his son for years after the boy was taken by a rainforest tribe in South America and applying his ever-increasing pessimism about humanity and its relationship to technology, Boorman takes his ideas towards their supposedly inevitable conclusion and embraces the noble savage fully and completely. This would be fine if the story were better built and less muddled in its delivery of the ideas, though. As it stands, The Emerald Forest needed someone with a stronger story sense than Boorman or his regular screenwriter Rospo Pallenberg to iron things out, especially in its third act.

Bill (Powers Booth) works for a company building a dam in the Amazon, and upon his arrival in Brazil he takes his wife Jean (Meg Foster) and two children, in particular Tommy, to a clearing site where bulldozers are able to easily tear down the shallow rooted trees. Tommy wanders off a bit and ends up missing, taken by The Invisible People, a small tribe with minimal contact to any other tribe, much less the modern world. Ten years go by, and Bill has spent as much time as possible looking for Tommy to no avail. Jean has taken it to volunteer with homeless children in the city. With a few days away from work, Bill brings along a photojournalist, Eduardo (Uwe Werner), to one of his regular peeks into the jungles, following what clues he can to try and identify the location of some of the uncontacted tribes in the region.

This movement into the jungle is the film at its best. It’s where Boorman fully embraces the “heart of darkness” ideas visually that he’d been playing with, honestly, since his first film Catch Us If You Can. It even gets into some heavy visual parallels with Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, using red gels on lights to create a hellish look into the dangerous jungle when Bill and Eduardo encounter The Fierce People, a supposedly cannibalistic tribe that enjoys preying on The Invisible People. Bill barely gets away through the use of his rifle which strikes fear into them only briefly, just enough so that he can run and then can give chase so they can get their hands on the rifle themselves. This, coincidentally, brings Bill into contact with The Invisible People, namely with Tomme (Charley Boorman), who has been completely absorbed into the native culture and remembers his real father as only a dream. His only real father is Wanadi (Rui Polanah), the leader of the Invisible People, and Tomme is well on his way to starting an adult life with them, in particular since he takes Kachiri (Dira Paes) as his wife.

The middle section of the film is dedicated to Bill discovering the world that Tomme had grown up in and the customs of the tribe while he tries to talk Tomme into coming back into the modern world with him, but Tomme feels no compulsion to leave and not even Wanadi will try and force Tomme to even observe the modern world to make a choice. It’s also here where the film begins its odd relationship with the life of the tribe. On the one hand, you have Wanadi treating Bill’s fever with a blow of smoke to his neck, a practice that Tomme’s friend makes fun of in the next scene, implying that the film understands that this sort of witch-doctorism is bunk, but it also embraces the “truth” of vision quests with Bill receiving a drug-induced one that shows him to be a leopard. Combined with Tomme’s earlier vision quest that made him into an eagle that found the location of some sacred stones (that they use to make warpaint that makes them invisible, which it obviously doesn’t), and you’ve got this weird little back and forth about the reality of the customs. At times, the film seems to treat the tribe like innocent and misguided children, and at other times the film treats them like they are tapped into another plane of existence and live above us.

The final third of the film is dedicated to the sudden introduction of a remote brothel servicing the workmen who uses the Fierce People to capture the women of the Invisible People while the warriors are away (returning Bill to the modern world). This is obviously tied thematically to the film, as it represents the modern world’s furthest reaches into its encroachment into the jungle, but this larger conflict actually hadn’t been any sort of focus until the final act. The first two-thirds was fully on board with the more micro version of the conflict, more in line with how Boorman had dealt with a similar conflict in Hell in the Pacific. The sudden need for actual physical violence and bloodshed feels like a sop to changing mores in film, with a push towards 80s action. I mean, it’s fine in execution with the Invisible People going up against the Fierce People who have guns while needing to recruit help from some former tribesman of the Bat Tribe and Bill to get through the fences, but the third vision quest, which gives Tomme the exact location of where to find Bill (there’s a single line about how he’s remembering, not seeing, but sure) makes it feel off.

And then, the whole affair where natives sold natives into sex slavery with the help of the outer reaches of the modern world convinces Bill to completely undo all of his work for the modern world. The film’s inability to treat its native tribes consistently flies in the face of Bill’s final decision with its serious finality and destructiveness.

So, the film is something of a mishmash. Boorman brings his normal filmmaking skills to the affair, but his inability to settle on ideas bites him once again. He can’t decide on the nature of the Invisible People, and he does not dedicate enough time to the macro conflict between the natural and modern world to satisfy the film’s finale. He’s made much better, but he’s also made much worse.

Rating: 2/4