Some films are just bad, and there’s almost a pleasure in slamming them. The Way Back is not one of those films. Peter Weir, one of the world’s great directors, tells a fascinating story – allegedly true, though that’s now being questioned – about seven men who escaped from a Siberian gulag during WW2 and walked 4000 miles across some of the most inhospitable landscapes on Earth. The visuals are sumptuous, the cast – including Ed Harris, who’s incapable of giving a bad performance, and elfin young actress Saoirse Ronan – do their best. That the result has zero emotional impact, ending up a handsome bore and something of an endurance test, is a crying shame and nothing to rejoice in.
There are worrying signs right from the start, the early scenes in the gulag where Janusz (Jim Sturgess) finds himself after being accused of being a spy by Stalin’s secret police. The detail has ‘true story’ written all over it – prisoners suffering from night blindness due to vitamin deficiency, one man narrating Treasure Island to his fellows like a parent telling a bedtime story, an inmate with a talent for drawing being paid to do a lifelike sketch of a nude woman, which a local Mafioso then sells to the highest bidder – but the basics are shaky, like for instance what language the actors should speak. Weir goes for a mish-mash that’s logical but awkward, so that Russians speak Russian when talking to other Russians, but the resident American (Harris) speaks English and the various other nationalities speak the kind of broken, heavily-accented English associated with shady foreigners in old Hollywood movies. Thus, for instance: “You stare at me like snake at rabbit”. Or perhaps: “I was Professor of Egyptology. Leningrad University”.
The dialogue, too, sounds old-fashioned. “They won’t all survive,” our hero is told when picking comrades to join him in escaping; “But they will die free men!” he replies nobly, the kind of line that provokes a ‘yeah, right’ reaction. The escape is first mooted by Mark Strong as a prisoner with a colourful past (“I was actor. Moving pictures”), but it turns out he’s all talk, no action – so instead Janusz takes off with six other men, heading to the border with Mongolia, walking for days across miles of Siberian tundra.
The men walk and walk – then walk some more. That’s the film in a nutshell: our heroes walk, then keep walking. (Weir should’ve asked a certain brand of Scotch whisky to help with the financing.) But The Way Back is probably the wrong length. It could’ve been a powerful set-piece, like the 20-minute scene where Clint Eastwood walks across the desert in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It could’ve been a six-hour mini-series, which at least would’ve lent some weight to the constant procession of incidents. As a 133-minute film, however, it’s both too long and not long enough; things keep happening, then are overcome almost at once. Our heroes eat worms, and contemplate cannibalism. (Then they find food.) A snowstorm leaves them almost blind. (Then they fashion masks out of tree-bark.) They try to find the lake that marks the border with Mongolia. (Then they find it.) Towards the end, there’s a terrible sandstorm. (Then they take shelter, and soon the storm is over.)
The rhythm becomes monotonous; nothing is allowed to build, forever forced to give way to the next incident. There’s also the problem that a two-hour film tends to work as a single narrative with a single goal; in this case, the goal is getting to Mongolia – but our heroes then discover that Mongolia too is Communist, meaning they have to go further, across the Gobi Desert then across the Himalayas to India. Once the goal changes, it’s hard to stay invested in the story. It begins to feel like the film might never end, Janusz and his friends walking on (and on) to the next snow-capped peak or sweeping sand dune.
Janusz, incidentally, is Polish, the others a veritable “League of Nations,” as someone puts it (there’s a Yugoslav, a Latvian, an American). The film opens with a caption explaining how Poland was bisected by the two evil forces of the 20th century – Stalin invading from one side, Hitler from the other – and The Way Back could be seen as a tale of empowerment, its literal journey also a moral journey. It’s a mirror of recent history, the way our modern age has escaped the heavy hand of ideology to embrace individual freedom, an ethos protected by the UN (which of course took over from the – yes – League of Nations). It’s also a film for Weir fans, the struggle between Man and Nature being a frequent theme in this director’s work: Nature played a starring role in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and The Mosquito Coast (1986), while heroes had to deal with an alien and perplexing environment in Weir’s two best-known films, Witness (1985) and The Truman Show (1998).
All very interesting, at least to film scholars. But what do you do with a 133-minute movie that stubbornly refuses to build? What do you do with a film that takes refuge in Big Speeches – even Ronan is defeated by the big hunk of cheesy reminiscence when her character recalls losing her family – and tries half-heartedly to flesh out its protagonists only to sink into cliché (it might’ve done better to leave them generic, just figures in a landscape)? What do you do with a well-meaning film that falls flat? You shake your head, and mark it down as a failure. But you don’t feel good about it.
DIRECTED BY Peter Weir
STARRING Jim Sturgess, Ed Harris, Colin Farrell, Saoirse Ronan
US 2010 133 mins.
