What you see isn’t necessarily what you get with ‘The Way Back’….and that’s a very, very good thing.
Not that I’m opposed to a good old fashioned sports-based tale of redemption, a la ‘Hoosiers’, which is exactly what the trailer suggests with this movie. And yes, you do have a lot of the standard elements….a broken, down-on-his-luck basketball coach looking to lead an underdog ragtag high school team out of the pits of despair. You have the entitled-yet-talented hotshot who needs tough love, the quiet grinder who needs a little push to start believing in himself, and you can’t forget the big game where everything is on the line.
‘The Way Back’ has all of it….
…but all of it is secondary.
Anchored by a pitch perfect, all-in performance from Ben Affleck, ‘The Way Back’ is a character portrait, and it’s a gritty one. The fact that the aforementioned cliches are simply backdrop to a larger journey….that of an addict’s rocky road to recovery…is a bold enough move by writer Brad Ingelsby. But it’s the swerves that really put the exclamation point on why this film is so surprisingly good; there’s not really the happily-ever-after you’d expect with this one, only a sincere, honest look at what redemption REALLY looks like.
Affleck plays Jack Cunningham, a once-great high school hoopster now living in a seedy apartment, spending his days on the construction site and nights at a dive bar. Separated from his wife (Janina Gavankar) and drinking away a tragedy from their past, he has one last shot to escape the downward spiral – a call from his old Catholic high school with an opportunity to coach. The team is awful, but Jack eventually finds that re-discovering the fire from his hard court days provides a substitute vice, and as his bad habits subside, the squad improves. Of course, as most of us know, demons don’t magically disappear that easily.
Director Gavin O’Connor, not stranger to sports cinema (‘Miracle’, ‘Warrior’), also has some history with Affleck, directing him in ‘The Accountant’. It’s a good combination for ‘The Way Back’; the guy knows how to emotionally play with those metaphors, but has the right guy in place to explore the heart of the matter.
