There are two major problems with director Peter Weir’s “The Way Back,” a film “inspired” by the incredible story of seven prisoners who escape from a Soviet gulag circa 1940 only to discover that 4500 miles of hostile terrain lies between them and freedom. The first problem is that the story feels like one big anachronism. We’re twenty-plus years past the Cold War and, in the form of Islamic terrorism, facing an entirely new and different kind of evil. The point of telling this story decades after it might have actually done some good for the millions who died in these Siberian death camps is never made clear. Sure, even today, Hollywood keeps pumping out big-budget films set during WWII, but many of those don’t lose their sense of urgency due to a thematic drive that doesn’t grow old: the fight against evil and/or the price of freedom. Which brings me to the Weir’s second problem.

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If you’re going to go to all the trouble — for whatever reason — of making a movie exposing the last evil we faced, thematically it should at least speak to the one we’re facing now. “Inglorious Basterds” is a superb example. However, if you’re worried about a sternly-worded letter from C.A.I.R., then what you might do is grab hold of one of those universal themes that make any story work at any time and for anyone. Unfortunately, other than not dying, “The Way Back” has no real theme. This is not a story about a group of men fighting for personal liberty or a cause bigger than themselves, such as exposing the horror of these Gulags. These are men who simply don’t want to die. Survival is their primary motivation for escape and every step taken afterwards. 

To be clear, survival is a perfectly acceptable rationale in the real world, but we’re not talking about the real world. We’re talking about the art of storytelling and that requires something more, something bigger for the audience to grab hold of.  Ed Harris plays the only American in the group, a man who went to Russia hoping to escape the American Depression and for his troubles ended up in Siberia. But other than the cliche of his loner character learning to care for others, he doesn’t really have any kind of enlightened awakening. The other escapees, distinguished only be Colin Ferrell who overacts a bit as a colorful but vicious Russian gangster, are just as flat in their flattened character arcs.

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Well, better late than never, right? Not to take anything away from Peter Weir, who is a fantastic director, but does this mean that 20 years after the War on Terror ends we’ll finally see Hollywood’s First Attempt to Portray the Islamist Threat? Our friends over at Powerline have seen the movie and have more. Main story below.

Anne Applebaum in today’s Washington Post:

“It’s based on a true story.” Or “It’s truth, but stranger than fiction.” Or even: “You couldn’t make it up.” When Peter Weir gets sent film scripts these days, most of them advertise themselves as “true.” That wasn’t always the case: Weir (who made “Gallipoli,” “Witness,” “Master and Commander”) dates the tilt away from fiction and toward “fact” back to Sept. 11, 2001, the day reality did suddenly seem “exactly like a Hollywood movie.”

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Kurt Loder writing in Reason Magazine:

If you’re going to base a movie on an amazing true story, it would seem essential that the amazing story actually be true. This is unfortunately not the case with The Way Back. Not entirely, anyway. The picture is drawn from a 1956 book by Slawomir Rawicz, a Polish army officer who claimed to have escaped from a Soviet labor camp in 1940, along with six fellow prisoners, and walked 4000 miles to freedom through Mongolia and Tibet and over the Himalayas to British India.

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Subsequent research has indicated that while Rawicz was a prisoner in a Siberian camp, he never took part in the hellacious trek his book describes. On the other hand, it does appear possible that another group of escapees did make this amazing journey, and that Rawicz, who died in 2004, might simply have been recounting their ordeal.

In the film’s production notes, director Peter Weir acknowledges the ambiguity of this tale, but says that while Rawicz’s book may not be completely true, it is probably accurate in its harrowing details, and in any case constitutes a great adventure. I think we can accept this reasoning. And the movie, which is very well-made, has much to recommend it. Working with cinematographer Russell Boyd (who also shot Weir’s Master and Commander and The Year of Living Dangerously), the director leads us through some extraordinary environments, from the frozen forests of Siberia (actually Bulgaria) to the vast parched expanse of the Gobi Desert (actually Morocco). He also draws fine performances from the stars portraying three of the fugitives… (more…)

Last week, I stirred some folks up with my Top Ten Most Overrated Directors of All Time.  To recap, they were: Ridley Scott, Michael Mann, David Lean, Darren Aronofsky, Mike Nichols, David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Alfred Hitchcock.  And by “stirred some folks up,” I mean faced down a virtual lynch mob.  Who knew that Aronofsky supporters were fans of the film Fury? 

A few quick items in response to that piece.  First, it was not about “bad directors” (although some were plain bad, including Aronofsky), but about overrated directors.  Alfred Hitchcock is nowhere near the worst director ever (I was probably too harsh to label him “slightly better than mediocre”), but it is a travesty to label him the greatest director of all time, as so many have.  The same holds true for David Lean (I appreciate Great Expectations, Brief Encounter, and swaths of Bridge Over the River Kwai, I just think he doesn’t deserve to make the top 20 list). Second, I neglected three directors who clearly should have made the list: Roman Polanski (somebody stop the Chinatown cult!), Spike Lee (how can he make race relations this dull?), and Tim Burton (damn you for ruining Sweeney Todd).  Third, two corrections: (more…)