It is probably a good time to appreciate our freedom. In America, we’re spoiled by this. It often takes a movie, a book or a documentary to present itself to keep this idea alive. It is easy to take away rights from people who aren’t educated about them to begin with. Freedom isn’t a word I would allow the Tea Party to appropriate, or a war mongering administration — freedom is a human right.
Peter Weir’s The Way Back tells the story of a group of men who escape from a Siberian goulag during World War II. The idea here is that they would rather try to walk across continents than stay and be tortured in the camps. While this isn’t as accessible as Nazi concentration camps – those images are clear and unmistakable to us. The gulag imprisonment is less known, and that in itself makes The Way Back a slightly more difficult film in terms of making you feel something for these men.
The story of The Way Back comes from a book The Long Walk by S≈Çawomir Rawicz. Wikipedia says the book has been “The Long Walk was ghost-written by Ronald Downing based on conversations with Rawicz. It was released in the UK in 1956 and has sold over half a million copies worldwide and has been translated into 25 languages.” Wikipedia also has information that historical records do not back up the story – in other words, there is some question as to whether it actually happened or not.
This is not unfamiliar territory for Peter Weir, who took on a mythic story with Picnic at Hanging Rock. The story of those murdered girls was, it turned out, fiction. There is no truth to it at all. What seems to matter more is what the book has come to mean to people. This is why The Way Back has an element of being a religious story, one that has been re-imagined in retrospect.
Academic dictionaries writes:
Słavomir Rawicz (1915 – 2004) was a Polish soldier who was arrested by Soviet occupation troops after the German-Soviet invasion of Poland. In a book he participated in writing, he claimed that he and six others escaped and walked over 6500 km (4000 miles) south, through the Gobi desert, and over the Himalayas to India. In 2006, the BBC released a report based on records from the former Soviet Union including some written by Rawicz himself that show that Rawicz was pardoned as a part of a general release of Poles from the Soviet Union in 1942 and was afterward transported across the Caspian Sea to a refugee camp in Iran [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6098218.stm] and that his escape to India apparently never occurred.
The veracity of Picnic at Hanging Rock does not take away from the film’s artistry, influence or impact; it won’t for The Way Back either.
The Way Back works as a film whether you believe it’s true or not. I could not find any accounts of the other people involved in the story. It isn’t my job to judge the veracity of it – after all, many of the best films this year are interpreted truths – one person’s version of what happened, and in some cases, might have happened. The devil is in the details.
What you can take from The Way Back are two unwavering truths. The first is that freedom is something worth walking 4,000 miles for. The second, we survive on kindness of others. We need to be able to find places in our hearts for those who need us, even if it means it doesn’t make immediate sense to our own survival.
The main emotional thrust in the story, as well as the film’s most prominent Oscar contenders come from Ed Harris and Saoirse Ronan (who may very well be the best young actress working in Hollywood) who develop an unlikely bond in the film. Harris looks like he’s seen the Devil throughout. Not just because of what he saw before he was taken to the gulag, all that he’s seen since, but most importantly, what he sees coming. These men, and the one young girl, seem like walking ghosts; they were not meant to be alive and survive only on the will do so.
This film, like 127 Hours, is about survival. The thing that motivates both of them out of the potential collapse of succumbing to starvation or thirst is an image of what is waiting for them beyond their immediate circumstances.
Weir, as my friend Craig Kennedy said, does not beg for Oscar love with this film. If he did, there would be more stars in it. There would be more tears shed from the audience. There is a one full remove in how the
Like almost all of Peter Weir’s work, with a few notable exceptions, like The Year of Living Dangerously and Witness, the emotions are not easily accessed throughout the film – there is a remoteness to it as we watch these men suffer. It forces us to stop and look at what it really is. It opens up the questions as to whether what they were doing was worth it at all. Would it have been better, as the war lords would have them believe, that they were almost better off being tortured and starved in a gulag? We do wonder, though, as their feet puff up like water balloons, their skin stripped away by the relentless sun, and their quest for water is very nearly the death of them all.
There is no doubt that The Way Back is a difficult sit. Is it an important movie? It will be to some groups, no doubt. Is it Weir’s best? Probably not. Is it one of the best of 2010? Most certainly. You don’t let a film like this slip through unnoticed. Weir gets major points for finding a unique way to tell a familiar story.
Other than Ed Harris, who seems destined, finally, for an Oscar nomination (and could he win this time?), the other major standout is Colin Farrell. Watching Farrell here I was suddenly aware of how good he really is – even though he’s always good, but there is something different about his work now. What a shame that the press about his personal life eclipsed his obvious talent.
The Way Back is a film that I have been thinking about since I saw it. It joins 2010 as one of the most memorable years for visionary directors. It’s not an easy film, and many will give up on it during the first half – and if they do, they will miss what is best about it, the second half. It takes for the characters to reveal themselves and for the story to build. Despite how raw I feel after seeing some of the films this year that truly gnaw and tear at the soul – Biutiful, Blue Valentine, 127 Hours, and now The Way Back – there is still room to open up another dimension and let this one in too.