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THE WAY BACK (2010): What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger

February 21st 2011 08:15

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Peter Weir has had a long break since 2003’s Master and Commander, the swashbuckling, seafaring adventure starring Russell Crowe. With The Way Back he continues in the vein of recreating history, but on a different scale altogether. The film was inspired by a World War II memoir, The Long Walk by Slawomir Rawicz, as well as extensive research into the period and interviews with Russian gulag survivors. While the book itself generated controversy, as there are implications that the author might not exactly have been describing his own experiences, the events portrayed did actually take place. Delving into a time in history shrouded in disgrace and not much discussed, The Way Back depicts the awe-inspiring 4000 miles-long journey of a handful ex-gulag prisoners from Siberia all the way to India, in an effort to escape the sweeping onslaught of the communist regime for which they are marked men.

Polish army officer Janusz (Jim Sturgess) is falsely accused of spying for the enemy and sent to a gulag in Siberia. There he meets a random assortment of characters raging from petty criminals to foreigners who found themselves at the wrong spot at the wrong time. Knowing he faces certain death working in inhumane conditions in the forest and at the mines while enduring the lashings of taiga weather and malnutrition, he is bent on organising an escape against all odds. A mutinous band soon assembles, including an American engineer Mr Smith (the always arresting Ed Harris), a street criminal Valka (a scruffy Colin Farrell, who manages to disappear into his character), a tormented priest, an artist, an accountant and a boy suffering from snow blindness. They miraculously manage to make a run for it one night, disappearing into a snow storm.

The icy joys of a Siberian gulag in The Way Back (2010)

In contrast to the survival of the fittest policy of the camp itself, once out the escapees have to rely on one another to survive. The film’s genre is best described as survivalist drama, as the story it tells involves not only crossing hundreds of miles of mountains and deserts on foot, but also such cuisine-related horrors as the eating of snakes and stealing rather raw meals from a pack of wolves. In other words, an adventure not for the faint-of-heart.

Jim Sturgess, Colin Farrell and Ed Harris in The Way Back

And what these men have is plenty of heart, resilience and true grit in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity awaiting them on the road to freedom. On the way, they pick up another refugee, a young Polish girl, Irena (Saoirse Ronan), whose presence changes the dynamics of the group, reminding them of their higher, civilised instincts while deepening their mutual bonds and extracting their traumatic personal histories.

Despite the considerable length of the feature at 133 minutes, it is thoroughly engrossing and completely captures the viewer’s emotional investment, transfixing our gaze on the screen for the entire duration. The journey is harrowing, moving and fascinating in equal measure, with beautiful photography by Weir’s longtime collaborator, Russell Boyd, who effortlessly convinces us that Morocco and Bulgaria are in fact the Gobi and Siberia.

Saoirse Ronan in The Way Back

One minor drawback of the film are the pidgin-English accents throughout, a Hollywood convention thought up to solve the problem of having a film with subtitles. When Polish is spoken, non-native actors are used, which is an even worse approach.

What Weir has done so successfully however, is capture the human stories of people cursed to live in “interesting times,” of social and political upheaval and displacement on a massive scale. Little gems of anecdotal humour told by survivors around family tables for decades to come, such as when mosquitoes mercilessly bite, personal safety, the threat of war-camps, hunger and everything else takes a back seat, as one of the ex-prisoners jumps out of the bushes to make potentially lethal contact with a local villager to ask for help. What one can find after taking the plunge into this extremely long walk, is not only an effective insight into a world torn by a senseless ideological conflict, but also the unexpected reservoirs of human kindness that remain in the most unlikely of places, and depth of spirit that ultimately cannot be broken.