The Way Back
THE WAY BACK - WARNER BROSOscar Wilde famously wrote in 1889 that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”. One case against this is Gavin O’Connor’s The Way Back, a redemptive story of sporting success and failure; Ben Affleck plays a struggling alcoholic who is brought on board to coach the high school basketball team that he took to the top of the leaderboards as a top player in his youth.
Oscar Wilde’s quote is relevant to the casting of the film’s protagonist Jack Cunningham, as Ben Affleck has been quite publicly struggling with alcohol addiction and stints in rehabilitation for some time now; in this film he seemingly uses his art as another form of therapy. Affleck was noted to have most recently left rehab to prepare for this role, and it is fair to say that The Way Back’s most substantial quality is his gritty, raw, and above all else genuine real lead performance. Hidden behind a grizzled beard, a little middle-aged body fat and an unfortunate balance of sadness and fear in his eyes, Hollywood heart-throb Ben Affleck successfully disappears into the role of a washed-up construction worker. He is a man who once had his whole life ahead of him, but soon fell to the wayside, and has struggled to find his way back since.
It is somewhat of a slight shame, then, that the screenplay for The Way Back is less careful with the familiar tropes and clichés of a comeback sports story, than the direction and lead performances with the aspects of a well-crafted character study. Brad Ingelsby’s screenplay offers plenty of thematically interesting ideas but never seems too interested in engaging with them whole-heartedly. Whereas The Way Back could have offered something much more substantive to the canon of movies on addiction, regret and loss, it instead ambles along and successfully hits every one of this genre’s predicted beats right when it is expected to. Given a more carefully written screenplay, Affleck would have undoubtedly delivered a performance that would have raced him to the top of the Awards discussions.
All of this is not to say that the film is not generally well made. It looks admirable, it does not drag at any given point, and it is effectively mediocre in offering enough drama and well-polished production to keep an audience at least somewhat engaged, in most of its storytelling. This would be all well and good without a committed, personal and touching lead performance, and in this regard, The Way Back is more of an unfortunate wasted opportunity than an outright unsatisfactory film.