The Mosquito Coast

“The United States is going to hell in a handbasket,” so we’ve heard many say, including the main character of this movie, The Mosquito Coast.  The movie provides a reasonable moral warning to those who think they want to pack up to leave this country for a better land, either because the country’s going socialistic, going capitalistic, getting immoral, or any which way you think is bad.  As well, The Mosquito Coast is a commentary on the classic American ethos: self-made, independent, and always on the go.

Here the main character, Allie Fox, is a genius inventor who grumpily complains to his oldest son that America is going down the toilet.  “We eat when we’re not hungry, drink when we’re not thirsty. We buy what we don’t need and throw away everything that’s useful,” Allie complains while in a grocery chain store.  He is not a Marxist, however, but a quasi-traditionalist who believes partly in classic American values and completely in his own self-determination.  Fox’s complaints include consumer culture, the possibility of nuclear war, and increasing dependence on government.  He has an absolute trust in progress, and he demands that others adopt his pluck and inventiveness: “It’s an absolute sin to accept the decadence of obsolescence. Why do things get worse and worse? They don’t have to. They could get better and better.”

Fed up with the United States, Fox decides to pick up his family of six and move to the Mosquito Coast, manifesting his American spirit.  Even though he is sick of the U.S., Fox is thoroughly American.  He wants to enter a natural paradise and create civilization, a civilization on his own terms.   He wants the wilderness and the machine at the same time, with himself in control and as few people around as possible.

So Fox and family move to the jungle in the Caribbean and end up buying a small village in the middle of nowhere.  Along the way Fox runs into a charismatic missionary, Reverend Spellgood.  As something of an atheist, Fox demonstrates that he is the intellectual better of the two, and thereafter the two become rivals, competing for the hearts and minds of the locals.  Spellgood doesn’t much like what Fox is up to, and Fox thinks Spellgood is a charlatan.  In a sense, the movie seems to say, both are two of the same spirit: crafty leaders, one scientific and one religious, both quintessentially American.

Needless to say, Fox’s social and scientific experiments are utter failures, in stark contrast to his views on human progress.  Fox directly compares himself to Dr. Frankenstein, an apt comparison which plays out symbolically in the fate of Fox’s pet project, an enormous ice machine that uses nothing but fire and ammonia to make ice.

The story is told through the eyes of Fox’s son, Charlie Fox, a teenager who is unsure how to view his independently-minded father.  Fox’s entire family suffers from his obsessions and self-centeredness, especially in the latter stages of the movie when Fox takes them all — starving and weary — on a raft up a river, ala Heart of Darkness.  There are a number of discussion items for fathers and husbands in a study group to get out of this movie, particularly on the subject of overbearing or tyrannical family leaders.

To be sure, there are a number of flaws in the movie.  For example, the local Caribbeans are treated cinematically almost as noble savages.  Innocent and good-hearted, they are the pawns of Fox and Goodspeed.  The tribal drumbeats even serve to tempt young Charlie, who eschews the call to go native. The movie — in typical late 20th century fashion — compares the ambitious Americans with the happy-go-lucky Third Worlders.  In most respects it seems the Third Worlders are better, though the movie clearly serves to praise and critique the Fox family, while allowing the natives to only be background participants in the drama.

In spite of these and other flaws, The Mosquito Coast is intriguing enough to watch carefully.  It’s worthwhile to resurrect it in a time when your conservative or far-left friends are grumbling loudly about socialism and fascism and our national downward spiral.

Entertainment: 8

Intelligence: 7

Morality: 7 (on par with Pixar and other animated films, in terms of the lack of sex and bad language)