'Embrace' a vibrant look at past atrocity

Ciro Guerra's period drama "Embrace of the Serpent" won an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film for Colombia, and it's easy to see why.

David Gallego's eyeball-bouncing, black-and-white, super-widescreen visual portal into a past world screams "art of the cinema" at the same time addressing the fairly black-and-white topic of whites invading, corrupting and killing the culture of denizens of the Amazon at the turn of the 20th century.

"Embrace of the Serpent" opens with an ailing German explorer, Theo (Jan Bijvoet), and his local guide Manduca (Miguel Dionisio Ramos) approaching a muscular, young shaman named Karamakate (Nilbio Torres) on a jungle river bank.

Theo seeks a rare plant called the yakruna. He believes it can cure his illness. Karamakate knows about the medicinal plant, but he also knows Theo's kind has wiped out his tribe in a frenzied obsession for profitable rubber trees.

Karamakate finally agrees to help Theo find his plant if he can reunite him with survivors from his tribe. Off they go down a wary river into a world in which Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" collides with Werner Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo" topped with a none-too-subtle indictment against European colonialism.

"Embrace" jumps to years later when Karamakate has become an older, wiser man (Antonio Bolivar Salvado Yangiama) who now meets another explorer, an American named Evans (Brionne Davis). He, too, seeks the yakruna plant.

Guerra's story pinballs between these time periods, taking us along on an odyssey of greed, death and exploitation, introducing us to native cultures scarred by the invading whites, especially those who use the Catholic Church to project themselves as the Messiah.

"Embrace" could benefit from a tighter cut than editors Etienne Boussac and Cristina Gallego supply. A full-color, primitive reworking of the trippy hallucinogenic sequence near the end of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" feels heavy-handed and blunt.

But this smart, metaphor-loving drama (based on real-life explorers Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evans Schultes) puts its heart up on the silver screen.

And we are allowed to feel sad.