Werner Herzog’s Amazon adventure rewards patience with Klaus Kinski’s fierce conviction and landscapes that make the whole enterprise look unreasonable. The wandering narrative tests that patience, but the film earns an uninterrupted evening.
Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo is a rewarding adventure that takes too long to get where it is going. Its opera enthusiast wants to bring his passion to the Amazon jungle, an ambition Klaus Kinski makes both absurd and difficult to dismiss. Herzog, who also wrote the screenplay, takes that wish seriously enough to give it 157 minutes. The patience required is considerable, but so is the pleasure of watching a film pursue something so impractical without apologising for it.
Kinski does much of the persuading. His Fitzcarraldo has the concentration of a man who has stopped distinguishing between wanting something and having a right to it. Yet the desire for opera gives that intensity an unexpectedly gentle purpose. We were moved by the seriousness Kinski gives this improbable wish; he makes us believe that Fitzcarraldo needs opera to live.
Thomas Mauch’s cinematography gives the Amazon scenery enough force to compete with him. We were awed by the scale of the landscape, which makes Fitzcarraldo’s determination look a little ridiculous. Mauch gives the jungle enough prominence to distract us from Kinski, and the film benefits whenever our attention wanders towards it. There is a pleasure in looking that survives even the stretches when the story has stopped making much progress.
Ulrich Bergfelder and Henning von Gierke’s production design is persuasive in its sense of weight, particularly the steamship’s awkward bulk. Simply looking at that vessel makes Fitzcarraldo’s enthusiasm seem insufficient, which is exactly the difficulty the adventure needs us to understand. The boat never feels like a prop that can be tidied away when it has served the story. Popol Vuh’s music gives the journey an eerie calm, a welcome relief from the protagonist’s insistence.
Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus’s editing is less consistently persuasive, though the willingness to linger plainly belongs to Herzog too. The long stretches give the landscape time to register, but the narrative also wanders after we have understood the protagonist’s determination. The repeated insistence begins to feel redundant, and some passages demand patience without adding much to our knowledge of the man. We would hesitate to recommend this to anyone who needs an adventure to keep advancing from one clearly defined task to the next.
As an adventure, it is unusually willing to leave its central enterprise looking unreasonable. The wish to bring opera to the jungle has charm, though charm does not settle every question about a man who expects the world to accommodate his taste. Herzog’s screenplay could look harder at that expectation, and the film sometimes seems too impressed by determination itself. Kinski keeps the character interesting through those indulgences, but the attention paid to his conviction can leave little space to question it.
At 157 minutes, this needs more than a casual slot between other things. We would give it an uninterrupted evening, and accept that some of that evening will involve waiting. Choose a night when nobody is going to ask how much longer it has left.
