Plot summary
Bill Markham (Powers Boothe) is an engineer who has moved to Brazil with his family to work on a large hydro-electric dam. The film opens on Markham, his wife Jean (Meg Foster), his young son Tommy (William Rodriguez), and his daughter Heather (Yara Vaneau) having a picnic on the edge of the jungle, which is being cleared for the dam's construction. Tommy wanders from the cleared area, and an Indian (Rui Polanah) from one of the indigenous tribes known as the Invisible People notices Tommy and takes him. Markham pursues the pair into the forest but does not find his son.
Ten years later, the dam is nearing completion. A 17-year-old Tommy (Charley Boorman), now called Tomme, has become one of the Invisible People. When his father, Chief Wanadi, the man who took and adopted Tommy, notices Tomme is now smitten with girls, he initiates Tomme's coming-of-age rite, after which Tomme undergoes a vision quest. Tomme's spirit animal tells him he must retrieve sacred stones from a remote spot deep in the jungle. Wanadi warns him that the quest will be dangerous, as it will take him into the territory of the cannibalistic Fierce People.
Meanwhile, Markham has finally identified his son's abductors. Markham and a journalist (Eduardo Conde) decide to set off bottle rockets to attract the attention of the Invisible People. Instead, they attract the Fierce People and are captured. Armed with a CAR-15 carbine, Markham is able to defend himself long enough to talk with Chief Jacareh (Claudio Moreno) who releases Markham for the night, promising to hunt him down in the morning, while the Fierce People kill and butcher the journalist. Close to dawn, Markham stumbles into Tomme collecting the sacred stones. The two recognize each other just as the Fierce People arrive, shooting Markham in the shoulder. Tomme and his father manage to escape, leaving Markham's carbine behind. In the care of the Invisible People, Markham recovers from his injuries and discovers that his son has chosen a wife, a young woman named Kachiri (Dira Paes).
Jacareh, recognizing the destructive power of Markham's carbine, visits a seedy brothel at the edge of the construction zone and arranges to exchange women for ammunition and more guns.
Wanadi presides over the wedding, with Markham seated in honour next to the chief; Markham watches as Tomme and Kachiri are wedded; he is still grief-stricken, even still upset with Wanadi, for his son being taken; Markham asks Chief Wanadi why he took Tommy all those years ago. Wanadi answered that he thought the white people must be terribly unhappy, since they were destroying the forest, but Tommy smiled at the Invisible People when he saw them; the Chief took Tommy to save him.
Wanadi has Markham given the herb to instigate Markham's own vision quest, and he wakes up back at the dam's construction zone.
Tomme and his friends return to their village to discover that many of the Invisible People have been murdered and all the young women abducted by the Fierce People. Tracking the Fierce People, they find their women inside a building protected by unfamiliar, and deadly, technology. In the ensuing battle, the Fierce People kill several members of the Invisible People, including Chief Wanadi. Desperate for help, Tomme navigates the city to his parents' condo, and Markham agrees to help rescue the women from the brothel.
That night, Markham initiates a shootout in the brothel while Tomme and his friends release the enslaved women from captivity. The Fierce Ones arrive to fight the Invisible People, but are defeated with Markham killing Chief Jacareh. Tomme is later sworn in as the new chief of the tribe. Markham warns Tomme that the almost-completed dam will end the tribe's way of life, but Tomme insists that the Invisible People are safe and they will ask the wildlife to bring on sufficient rain to break the dam. Markham does not trust that the dam can be broken with any amount of water that the animals can bring, so he decides to "help" the cause and destroy the dam himself. During the storm, Markham places demolition explosives at key points along the dam, but just as the detonator fails from a falling piece of equipment, the water breaches and destroys the dam, just as Tomme insisted could happen. Markham watches its destruction with mixed emotions.
The film ends with Tomme and Kachiri sitting at the swimming hole near their village in the jungle, watching the members of their tribe splash and play.
Reception
Box office
The film made its worldwide debut in France on June 25, 1985, where its recent Cannes buzz made it a sizeable hit. With 2,652,685 admissions nationwide, including 711,929 in Greater Paris, it was the 12th most popular film of the year in the country, and the 10th most popular in the capital region. [6]
In the United States, The Emerald Forest opened on July 5, 1985 via independent distributor Embassy Pictures, on a moderate 1,110 screens. It finished its run at the local box office with $24,468,550. [7]
The film opened in its native U.K. on August 23, 1985, in second place, but quickly fell off the charts, only drawing a lackluster £765,000 domestically. [8]
Critical
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 84% of 19 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 7.2/10. [9] The Emerald Forest was designated a Critics' Pick by a New York Times reviewer, who called it "compelling and richly atmospheric". [10] Derek Malcolm of The Guardian wrote, "This simplicity of expression, combined with Boorman's usual sophisticated visual technique, makes it a genuine oddity. But, whatever its faults, it looks glorious, tells a fascinating story and is a piece of sheer cinema you have to see." [11] In a negative review, Paul Attanasio of the Washington Post called it "long, wheezy tribute to the Noble Savage" and more of "a National Geographic special" than a proper film. [12]
Inspiration
The film was promoted as "based on a true story". Critic Harlan Ellison in his book Harlan Ellison's Watching wrote that attempts by SCAN [14] to get background information on the real story revealed that Rospo Pallenberg's original screenplay was based on several stories, [15] including an article in the Los Angeles Times about a Peruvian labourer whose child had been abducted by a local Indian tribe and located sixteen years later almost fully assimilated. [16] Pallenberg's agent told SCAN that while director John Boorman had said that he read the original L.A. Times article, in fact, he had not, but was simply working from Pallenberg's screenplay. According to SCAN, Boorman told NPR's All Things Considered that the son was still living with the tribe in 1985, and identified the tribe as "the Mayoruna", yet detailed anthropological studies of that tribe do not mention an adopted outsider. [15]
A possible additional source for The Emerald Forest is the book Wizard of the Upper Amazon (1971). [17] The story is an autobiographical account of Manuel Córdova-Rios’ kidnapping when he was a teenager working for rubber cutters in the Amazon in the early 1900s. He was taken by a group of Native Amazonians to their remote Indian village. These Amazonians were fiercely independent and had fled into the interior because they refused to live under the subservient conditions imposed by the rubber barons at that time. Cordova-Rios was incorporated into their tribe and describes a life strikingly similar to the one depicted in The Emerald Forest. [17] [18]
Contrary to Ellison's conclusion, a contemporaneous January 1985 review in Variety magazine states up front that the movie is "[b]ased on an uncredited true story about a Peruvian whose son disappeared in the jungles of Brazil." [19] The Los Angeles Times article also mentioned that the Peruvian child had at the time decided as an adult to stay with his adoptive tribe. [16]
