Culture
Review

The Way Back

Continent-hopping adventure story is beautiful but somewhat lacking.

Christianity Today January 21, 2011

The Way Back is a period film that combines a lot of elements that typically add up to a cinematic slam-dunk: WWII, Cold War, long-horizon shots of deserts, a survival-against-all-odds plot, Oscar-nominated director Peter Weir, and Ed Harris. And certainly there are moments here and there when the film feels utterly epic and masterful. But by and large, The Way Back is bit of a minor film, albeit a beautiful and ambitious one.

Inspired by the true story as dramatized in the book, The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz, The Way Back depicts the harrowing tale of a band of prisoners at a Soviet Gulag who escape their Siberian imprisonment and trek on foot through Siberia, Mongolia, and the Gobi Desert on the path to freedom from communist oppression. More than 4,000 miles later, they finally reached British India.

Jim Sturgess as Janusz
Jim Sturgess as Janusz

The film begins in the prison camp of the wintry, desolate Siberian Gulag. Here we meet our protagonist—an affable young Polish prisoner named Janusz (Jim Sturgess), arrested for supposedly being a spy. In prison he meets the ragtag band that will ultimately join him in making an escape: a quietly dignified American (Ed Harris), a hardened Russian street criminal (Colin Farrell), and a handful of others who opt to brave the impossibly harsh odds of surviving on the run in Siberia. After making their escape during a whiteout blizzard, the men begin their arduous journey south, trying to get out of the Soviet Union without being discovered by soldiers or turned in by a party-sympathizing comrade for ransom.

The rest of the film consists of a series of episodes dealing with the challenges of the locales they must pass through—the frigid snowstorms of Siberia, the stifling heat and arid nothingness of China’s Gobi Desert, and the final challenge of crossing the Himalayan Mountains on foot, exhausted and physically battered from months of harsh terrain and little food. Survival methods include things like eating insects and snakes, drinking water from stagnant puddles, creating makeshift snow masks and desert shoes out of natural materials, and just walking, walking, walking, without stopping.

Ed Harris as Mr. Smith
Ed Harris as Mr. Smith

The Way Back, funded in part by National Geographic Entertainment, sometimes feels less like a narrative movie than a nature documentary, bent on capturing some of the most spectacular, little-known landscapes of the far corners of the world. Beautifully filmed by cinematographer Russell Boyd on location in Bulgaria, Morocco and India, the film certainly succeeds as a visual spectacle and continent-hopping travelogue. But is it as successful as a compelling, character-driven drama?

That’s the main complaint here. The film spends insufficient time developing its characters and too much time showing monotonous scenes of walking through deserts and foraging for food. Harris does deliver a quietly affecting performance, but it’s mostly a film interested in the monotonous struggles of humanity in the face of a vast, cruel nature, moving from one near-death experience to the next.

Saoirse Ronan as Irena??????
Saoirse Ronan as Irena

Like his last film, the exquisite Master & Commander: Far Side of the World, Weir’s latest is about a group of men traveling together, trying to survive together, some successfully and some not. The Way Back very much fits Weir’s body of work, especially Master & Commander. Both films explore themes of man vs. nature and man vs. man, the tension between a survival-of-the-fittest Darwinian pragmatism and a romantic, humane idealism. The Way Back expresses this tension overtly at times. In one early scene, the starving escapees chase away a pack of scavenging wolves and then huddle around the abandoned deer carcass, ravenously picking at it like they are wolves themselves. It’s animalistic—very Jack London, Call of the Wild.

But as the film progresses and the men bond on their journey, their humanity starts to break through. Along the way they meet a young female refugee (Saoirse Ronan) who brings a burst of compassion and human interest into the group. She teaches the men to care for one another beyond their strength-in-numbers survival instincts. As the journey gets bleaker—and more and more characters die—the miraculous beauty of life is underscored. This is a subtle film, steadfast and un-gimmicky, an old-school epic less interested in chase scenes and explosions than in a cinematic study of the natural world and man’s struggle within it. It’s reminiscent of 127 Hours, which also explored survival and human will but on a much smaller scale. Still, 127 Hours packs a bigger punch than The Way Back, probably because where Weir opted to focus energies on depicting the brutal majesty of nature writ large, Danny Boyle focused on a more intimate, singular character’s struggle in one tiny little crevice in the desert.

The group has to traverse all sorts of topography??????
The group has to traverse all sorts of topography

In the end, The Way Back is a sometimes-compelling drama about freedom, camaraderie, and the human will, much like Weir’s previous (and better) films Gallipoli, Dead Poet’s Society, and The Truman Show. Like those films, The Way Back is deeply masculine and very western—what with its thematic concerns with liberty and freedom from oppression. It’s an adventurer’s tale, an ambitious road movie, but one that, in the end, doesn’t quite reach the heights it might have.

Talk About It

Discussion starters
  1. What keeps Janusz and his cohorts going? What would keep you going in the same situation?
  2. How did you feel when certain characters died? Were the death scenes sad? Ambivalent?
  3. As the film goes on, how does the humanity of the characters develop in contrast to the harsh, animal-like savagery of some of the earlier scenes?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

The Way Back is rated PG-13 for violence and scenes of suffering and death. It’s not extreme, however, and there isn’t a lot of blood. There is no sex or nudity (except for a few shots of sketches of nude women) and very little objectionable language. It’s an entertaining and historically valuable film that parents could feel good about watching with their adolescent kids.

Photos © Newmarket Films.

Copyright © 2011 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

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