Premise: An alcoholic former basketball star takes a job coaching for his old high school team.
I'll do my best to avoid turning this into a post about how much I love the movie Warrior: a film from the same director, made in 2011, that is one of my 10 favorite movies ever. It's going to be hard though, because The Way Back is made with a lot of the same instincts. It's an underdog movie. It's got an alcoholic father. The camera is almost rudely intimate at times. Ever more so than Warrior, the sports are more of a secondary concern to the character arc. The movie also ends with a lot of dangling threads on purpose (i.e. it's not a clean resolution).
The Way Back is one of the first victims of COVID. It's the movie that ended my nearly 8-year streak of seeing one or more movies every week without exception. I was going to see it in early March, then COVID panic set in, and I couldn't see the point in going to a movie theater (they all shut down in less than a week anyway). I've been chomping at the bit for it to stream somewhere though because of those exact similarities to Warrior that I listed.
The Way Back isn't quite the movie I expected. I thought the Basketball would be more front and center. There's a little Hoosiers in this. The training montage in the middle is fun. It certainly doesn't capture the intensity of a basketball game the way Warrior does with MMA. It makes a bold choice the drop the basketball almost entirely by the end. I didn't track it, but I don't think the last 20 minutes even showed a game. That's because the story is ultimately about Ben Affleck's way back. The basketball helped, because it gave him some purpose. But he had bigger demons. A lot of coverage of this movie has gone toward the parallels between Affleck's character in this and his real-life issues with sobriety. I don't care that much about that though. Let's just say it definitely helps the verisimilitude of his performance.
I feel ancient saying this, but there's a detail that really threw me in this movie. The players on the team were immediately respectful to Affleck from the moment he was announced as coach. The movie does try to play up a culture or generational gap here. The players aren't all in gangs or living in ghettos. They are going to a small private Catholic high school. They've had a lot of the disobedience worked out of them already. They were shown Ben Affleck as an authority figure and were quick to buy it. That's closer to my experience with most teenagers. Most aren't rebels. This detail felt so well-observed that it made me look past a lot of the other cliches and shortcuts the movie takes.
I was a little irked by the revelation of why Ben Affleck was a drunk. It was too neat. I would've preferred if his alcoholism wasn't tied to this personal tragedy. Like, he already had a problem and that event exacerbated it. That would've been more interesting. As it was written, a lot of the work fell on Ben Affleck to sell in his performance, which he does quite well. In a just world, he'd at least be in the discussion for Oscar consideration for this, even though I doubt he'd make the final cut. The Way Back really is a "second choice movie". Say I want to watch Warrior again but I just watched it last weekend. The Way Back isn't nearly as good as Warrior, but it's good enough and similar in the right ways to scratch the same itch.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
No comments:
Post a Comment