Culture Blues

The Instant Movie Club: The Way Back

Every week, your friends at Culture Blues get together to watch a movie from their Netflix Instant queue. Then, they discuss it over a meal of grilled snake and damp washcloth. This is The Instant Movie Club.

This week we’ll be discussing The Way Back – Peter Weir directs this tale of WWII labor camp escapees trying to cross Siberia, The Gobi Desert, and The Himalayas on foot. Stars include Ed Harris, Colin Farrell, and Jim Sturgess.

Next Week: The Housemaid – A wealthy family’s new maid attracts the attention of the patriarch in this sexy thriller from Korea.

SPOILERS BELOW!

Jeremiah White: The Way Back wisely avoids overdramatizing its “true story.” It’s admirable how Peter Weir’s film handles the remarkable story of Gulag prisoners traveling the 4,000 miles from Siberia to India on foot in an almost matter of fact way. There is relatively little conflict amongst the characters. There are very few real brushes with death. No one hangs off a cliff. It’s a story of people surviving, not overcoming. I like that.

Unfortunately, so much happens in the story, yet not a whole lot happens in the movie. Weir (who directed and co-wrote) avoids relying on thrills and chills, but the actors and characters aren’t strong enough to carry the movie. The only characters I could tell apart were the ones played by actors I’m familiar with. Jim Sturgess fails to make an impression as the group’s de facto leader. Ed Harris is good as the grumpy loner, but the character’s a little too familiar to be engaging. Colin Farrell, somewhat surprisingly, serves up the most interesting character. His animalistic criminal doesn’t apologize for his violent or unlawful ways, but he also doesn’t revel in them. He’s simply been living a “by any means necessary” kind of existence for a long time. I’d have liked to see his trip into town that resulted in one dead dog and a lot of food for the group.

In his ambivalent review, Roger Ebert writes that The Way Back has “not enough of a story in the vulgar populist sense.” Ebert is conflicted about what he wishes The Way Back had been. I’m not. Maybe Weir didn’t want to add too much flair to material of questionable veracity, but there’s no reason to make such a flat and safe movie out of such an incredible story. And I don’t think there would be anything vulgar about populating it with more memorable characters.

More of him, less of the rest.

Jeff Hart:  A horrible thing happens to The Way Back at around the halfway mark. Colin Farrell and his wolf-knife scamper off into the night, preferring a life of smalltime crime in Russia to an endless trek through the desert. Thus exits what I would consider, to use Ebert’s terminology, the most vulgarly populist character in Weir’s film. And also the most interesting. I wasn’t surprised Farrell did well in this role  - he’s always served well by supporting parts with plenty of ticks – but I was surprised to see him exit so early, and more surprised still that no one else in the group developed into a dramatic catalyst to take his place. Once Farrell’s gone, it’s all about the walking.

It’s not surprising to see National Geographic’s logo out front of The Way Back. Weir’s film frequently plays like a nature video. The cinematography is often breathtaking. Nature is something else, man. Seeing the distances and the obstacles these people faced – or are purported to have faced, at least – is awe-inspiring. The endlessness of The Gobi Desert in particular gives me pause. However, would this tale be any less compelling if the characters were entirely replaced by a wise-sounding narrator? I doubt it.

For a film about surviving, there is very little of it. Weir offers some nice touches early, like Sturgess improvising masks out of tree bark to thwart snow blindness. Soon though, The Way Back runs out of survivalist tricks and boils down to our characters staggering their way to the next conveniently timed watering hole or quicksand stranded moose. For a film so concerned with maintaining veracity, it is awfully reliant on the hand of fate.

Outside of their various tragic backstories, Weir isn’t all that concerned with the ugly side of survival. Physically, he limits himself to sun burnt faces and swollen feet – the true physical manifestations of what such an impossible walk would’ve done to human bodies are left off screen. The mental trials are likewise downplayed; outside of a battle with wolves that leaves our hikers snarling at each other over a deer carcass while Sturgess balefully looks on, these characters all conduct themselves with the utmost dignity. Except for Farrell, but his suggestions of cannibalism are gone soon enough. Even Farrell, our prison-hardened Russian criminal, doesn’t raise so much as an eyebrow at the nubile Polish girl bathing in the lake.

Living in a Gulag and spending months in some of the world’s most inhospitable climates have certainly helped these guys suppress their animalistic nature. Weir doesn’t strive only for veracity, but for reverence. The WW2 generation is, as usual, immortalized as the noblest to ever grace our planet. Flat characters, a literally plodding plot that shackles itself to its constraining version of truth – it’s a good thing The Way Back looks really pretty.