The Mosquito Coast (1986)

A recent retrospective in Empire magazine on Peter Weir's directorial career lead me to record a couple of his films towards the end of last year. The first, The Year of Living Dangerously didn't do a lot for me, but the second, The Mosquito Coast, I found to be much more accessible and enjoyable to watch.

The film tells of Allie Fox (Harrison Ford, who I thought was excellent) and his family (including Helen Mirren as his wife and the wonderful River Phoenix as son and narrator Charlie), who he moves out of their comfortable US home to find somewhere to live untouched by the so-called American Dream and it's rampant consumerism. They end up in the jungles of central America, on the Mosquito Coast (which apparently covers Nicaragua and Honduras, and was historically a British protectorate), Allie buys a village and they set about building a self-sustaining housing-complex out of the jungle around them. Allie's crowning glory is a massive refrigeration system that provides air conditioning and doesn't run on electricity.

While offering comment on Americans and their comfortable, commodity driven lives, the movie is also a study of how Allie's pursuit of purity drives a wedge between himself and his family, and leads to him committing murder, accidentally blowing up the refrigerator and burning down the village. Soon Allie and his long-suffering family are floating up-river on a raft, trying to avoid religious missionaries, whose God Allie believes in less than the green-backed diety.

Ford delivers a powerful performance, perhaps not very subtle, as Allie becomes more and more untethered from reality and the needs and hopes of his family. Mirren is good in an underwritten role of a devoted wife who will follow her husband anywhere, but it is Phoenix who shines at the age of just 15, showing what a massive talent he was. He initially believes his father's good intentions and willingly follows him, but he gradually comes to suspect that Allie is not interested in the welfare of his children, and when he learns that Allie lied about the US being wiped out by a nuclear holocaust, the bond between the two snaps - but not irrevocably.

The Mosquito Coast explores interesting themes and is filmed in lush jungle surrounds, providing awesome vistas and a colourful backdrop for the domestic story to unfold against. For this is a movie about a boy who idolises his father and comes to realise that he isn't as strong as suspected, and that he has faults. It's a universal tale and Ford and Phoenix have not been better in anything I've seen them in before. The movie has made me seek out others from River Phoenix's tragically short filmography so I look forward to seeing more of him soon.