Big Screen Peter: The Way Back

Editor’s note: Peter Lewis has agreed to use whatever it is you call his writing style to provide some measure of analysis to those folks who still go to a theater to see a movie.

review by Peter Lewis

“The Way Back” was released this past weekend in a limited capacity. With star turns from the likes of Collin Farrell and Ed Harris, one would suspect that the film could very well get a wider release in the coming weeks.

The film tells the tale of a group of Soviet prisoners who escape from a gulag and travel overland from Siberia to British India in 1942. Sounds too good to be true, right?  Well, it is. The story is copped from a now debunked book by Slawomir Rawicz titled “The Long Walk.” The wheres and hows of the truth aren’t that important here, it’s the merits of the film itself that warrant discussion.

Directed by the famed Peter Weir, the film is an epic. The story covers roughly 4,000 miles. That’s roughly the distance from Austin, Texas, to Anchorage, Alaska, but covering terrain far less forgiving. And Weir not only adequately establishes the immenseness of their task, but succeeds in illustrating the unforgiving nature of the world. From the Gulag and the Gobi onward, brutish realities were on full display throughout the film.

However, the core of the narrative is centered on the group of escapees themselves. The group is almost unbearable in its trite makeup, rag tag in both form and function alike. Led by the overly earnest Polish officer Janusz (Jim Sturgess), the group also features an icy Ed Harris as Mr. Smith, a good natured jokester, a conflicted priest, a frustrated artist and a cold-blooded career criminal, Valka (Collin Farrell). The multi-national group is filled out by Irena, a young Pole who escaped a collective farm and happened upon the group along their trek.

The thrust of the film is to establish a story that not only illustrates the indomitable spirit of the populous, but one that also shows the bonds of humanity and kindness as they struggle through great odds. These bonds allow the indomitable spirit room to succeed, without them man is nothing. And judged from this perspective, the film is a success.  But on a larger, more critical level, the film fails slightly.

It might be easy to cast this illusive “something” on a failure by the actors, but the acting was well done throughout. Saoirse Ronan once more illustrated the promise of an acting career without limit and Ed Harris was once more his steely self. Even Collin Farrell was quite good. Where lies the failure then?

Perhaps the scope of the film was too big, or perhaps the run time too short, but Weir certainly misses something here. While the overall spirit of the movie is adequately translated, the film never quite achieves the loftiness it attributes to itself.

As the film winds to a close, there is no elation to be experienced in their completion. Nor is there even a rueful anger directed toward the fates. No emotion escapes. In its place is a sense of nothingness, a general feeling that something was lost along the way.

A narrative is worthless if it fails to invest the audience into its outcome. While “The Way Back” is far from worthless, it is a bitter reminder that capacity and reality rarely meet. When they do, it’s a fate to be celebrated heartily.

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