‘The Mosquito Coast’ Sits Alongside ‘Taxi Driver’ and ‘First Reformed’ In Paul Schrader’s Exploration of American Men Driven to Madness

Allie Fox (Harrison Ford) is every inch an American. He’s handsome, strong, resourceful, suspicious of institutions, racist in both simple and complicated ways, and because he’s shielded in large part from real consequence, arrogant and confident beyond reason. He is the amalgamation of Ford’s two greatest roles: a smuggler and a tomb robber. Seen here in Australian director Peter Weir’s The Mosquito Coast, though, he’s the embodiment of America’s worst collective traits: dangerous, precocious, childish.

The United States is a young country, founded by religious fundamentalists and given to valorizing criminal scofflaws as a means by which to reconcile our revolutionary past. Rebellion is in our cultural DNA, after all, and suffocating religiosity is the smokescreen for our essential lack of a moral and historical foundation. We are the worst-educated industrialized nation, but we do have the highest percentage of adults who believe in angels. We, as a nation, have prospered to the extent that we have because of our bounty of natural resources and, until recently, our industrial base. We are bullies, blustering blowhards who assert right with might and like all bullies and blowhards, the bill eventually comes due. Allie Fox likes to say that he loves America too much to hang around and watch it die. He’s also the reason it’s on a respirator.

Allie is smarter than everyone else, and he never tires of reminding everyone else of it. It might even be true as much good it does him. He has four children, two boys and twin girls, and a long-suffering wife whom he calls “Mother” (Helen Mirren) in a way that is as much affectionate as it is dehumanizing in its reduction of her into a function. I think he sees the world that way, in terms of whether something works or not and how, never why. His curiosity only extends to components and so there’s an early scene in The Mosquito Coast where Allie is lecturing his two boys, eldest Charlie (River Phoenix) and Jerry (Jadrien Steele) about the brilliance of this refrigeration unit he’s devised, by opening the hatch and comparing all the pieces to internal organs. Allie knows how things are put together, but not why they’re put together, you see. He’s the caricature of a surgeon: all procedures, no bedside manner. Charlie has a moment when he tells someone else, simply, “my dad’s a genius,” that broke my heart for the simplicity of a child’s belief for a while that their father is the best; infallible and indomitable. The bill comes due for that eventually, too. Allie is America’s underdeveloped superego and unfettered id – and Charlie is this country’s ego, struggling for respectability and reconciliation as it comes to terms with all the things it has done.

As the film opens, Charlie’s voiceover tells how Allie dropped out of Harvard, a brilliant engineering student, so that he could “get an education.” Allie is dying to tell everyone how broken the United States is, how it’s a “toilet” of consumerism destroyed by fecklessness, greed, and predatory foreign trade incursions. He has thoughts about the lie of “voodoo economics” that has made a loaf of bread two-dollars while wages have remained stagnant. It’s a rigged system designed for the rich to be richer and the poor to by design and necessity, become poorer, more desperate. There’s a war coming, Allie says, but the way Weir shoots New England in 1986, the apocalypse has already come and any nuclear holocaust would just be redundant overkill. Maybe when civilization is leveled, Allie reasons, people will finally appreciate his skills and ingenuity and perhaps finally get smart enough to envy that they are not as smart as him. The easiest thing to do is to identify when things are clearly and woefully broken. Harder is finding solutions. Allie is smart enough to be right about most things, but not smart enough to figure out a way to remain in the United States and especially not smart enough to figure out how he can help beyond all the griping about the obvious. Allie is just smart enough to be very dangerous.

In a fit of pique after his employer, an asparagus farmer Mr. Polski (Dick O’Neill), himself an immigrant employing teams of immigrants, fails to see the practical application of one of Allie’s doodads, Allie packs the things he deems essential and moves his family on a whim and a tantrum to Honduras’ Mosquito Coast. Before he goes, there’s a fascinating scene where Allie takes Charlie and Jerry into what the locals call “the monkey house,” the small shack where all the migrant workers live together in squalor. Allie is disgusted by the name, but sees the workers as noble savages tricked out of “the jungle” by the lie of the American Dream, only to end up in places like this and eventually part of the “problem;” i.e. the welfare state, poverty, crime that he believes is rampant in places like New York City where they’ll “stab you for $10 and come in through your windows if you stay home.” In 2021, he would be a MAGAt dreaming perhaps of 1986 where things were better for guys like him. In 1986, guys like him were Allie Fox. Maybe not as brilliant as Allie Fox, but just as smart.

Because The Mosquito Coast is more an allegory than an island adventure story, Allie’s first forays into the idealized jungle find him building a Swiss Family Robinson village complete with air conditioning and socialized dispersal of goods and wealth. But, Charlie says in his voiceover, things were too easy and his father began to resent being taken for granted. He wants to present the ice he’s managed to create in the middle of nowhere among people who have never dreamed of refrigeration to an isolated village he’s learned of so that the natives would look upon him and his invention with awe. I love Allie as a character because he has many of the qualities I admire and hope to share and many of the shortcomings I abhor about myself and hope to overcome. The need for praise is one, that desire to have an external marker of success to quiet the screaming emptiness embedded in me by this culture’s expectation of conspicuous markers of material success. If the “natives” could only look upon my works as they would a “jewel,” well, then I could finally tell my father’s shade that I have succeeded where he could not. I love that Allie’s archenemy in The Mosquito Coast is his inability to stop writing himself as the hero of his story. When they finally reach the isolated village after a day’s hike through tropical terrain to find that the ice has not survived the journey, he pivots into trying to “save” a trio of “white” men he sees slinking around in the shadows, trying to avoid detection. In his complicated racism, these men must be slaves to the natives who have rejected him. But, like Allie, these men are spoilers, opportunistic colonizers no better than the loathsome missionary, the Reverend Spellgood (Andre Gregory), whom Allie repeatedly humiliates but at whose hand Allie eventually falls.

Hot off their triumphant experience with Witness, Peter Weir and Harrison Ford (and the production team of DP John Seale, editor Thom Noble and composer Maurice Jarre), equipped with a script by New Hollywood legend Paul Schrader based on the award-winning novel by Paul Theroux, set off to Belize to film this ambitious, dystopian, socio-political psychodrama The Mosquito Coast. A resounding critical and commercial failure at the time, it would be three years before Weir would make another film (Dead Poets Society), and to this day Ford has little good to say about the project.

What I would say about The Mosquito Coast 35 years on is that it’s as important a film about Americans blinded by their belief in a broken Dream as the universally renowned Wall Street, which came out the following year. It also fits in well among Schrader’s gallery of American men driven to madness by an obsessive and deforming faith that they are meant to be something, that shining figure of The American that can not be (and has never really existed). I’m not surprised this superbly performed, gorgeously shot film didn’t do well at the time of its release because its target is America’s fragility as a nation. It’s also not surprising that it’s now being remade as an Apple TV+ series seeing as how it’s also about how just one madman that’s been given too much power and confidence — based on just his own belief that he’s smarter and better than everyone else — can get us all killed. I guess what I’m saying is that The Mosquito Coast warned us how Reagan and his followers might look after 35 years of metastasis, empowered to grow, unchecked, ever more vile and ignorant. But we didn’t want to listen then. I wonder if we want to listen now.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Where to stream The Mosquito Coast