It's no wonder moviegoers were left perplexed by the film of Paul Theroux's best-selling novel: What looks like a modernized Swiss Family Robinson survival adventure is actually a thinly disguised and unsettling allegory, with an unsympathetic (and largely metaphoric) protagonist. Harrison Ford stars as Angry American Allie Fox, a paragon of Yankee virtue and individuality: inventive, proud, and possessed by an arrogant idealism that eventually destroys him. Sickened by the rampant corruption of American consumerism, he removes his family (with the effortlessness of true fantasy) to the unspoiled wilderness of Central America, creating in the jungle a self-sufficient Utopian Eden, later to be annihilated by the unchecked magnitude of his own delusions. Paul Schrader's screenplay exaggerates the character, but never beyond credibility; it's doubtful Theroux's story could be told in strictly realistic terms anyway. The only thing missing is a good resolution: the apocalyptic climax occurs too soon, and the film has nowhere else to go afterwards.
Review of The Mosquito Coast
