“The Way Back” is a triumph as director Gavin O’Connor fashions a tale of the redemptive power of sports and purpose and at its core is a near unbearably personal performance from Ben Affleck.
Affleck plays Jack Cunningham, a high functioning alcoholic. A construction worker by day and a ghost of a man killing the hours around work in a constant state of numbing. Work isn’t a passion, it’s muscle memory. It ensures that when Jack goes to get loaded, he’s got the cash in his hand or the cans in the fridge.
By chance, and good fortune, Jack’s former Catholic High School – where he was one of the young most exceptional prospects in recent memory – needs a new basketball coach. Jack tries to say no, but something draws him back.
It would be easy to use the sports movie shorthand (“Hardball,” “The Mighty Ducks”) to say that Jack is hooked by this team and rescued. The trope usually relies on distilling the coach as an unredeemable arse, who through the success of his team, regains touch with humanity. “The Way Back” is different – here is a character amid a disconnected and incongruous process of torturously routine self-destruction. I saw Affleck’s Jack in free-fall, this team and this task is simply a back-up parachute.
O’Connor is a commanding sort, a coach-like director. His most celebrated work to date by far is “Warrior”. On the surface, it’s the seminal MMA film – years ahead of the pop-cultural awareness of the UFC. At its core, it’s a tale of wounded men. Abandonment, alcoholism, isolation, fatherhood – “Warrior” swells with regret. Nick Nolte’s performance explodes as much as co-star Tom Hardy’s trapezius muscles. “The Way Back” takes that elixir and adds a splash of ‘crisis of faith’ for good measure.
O’Connor relishes real spaces; deliberately shooting on location. Homes, like the characters, have visible wear and tear. Blinds could do with a wash; gutters look like they could do with a clean. Clothes feel like they’ve been worn and crumpled. That lived-in quality reinforces the habitual comforts of the familiar; no matter how dire they seem to the outsider.
The score by Robert Simonsen is delicate and funereal in quality. Its scaling, rhythmic piano (and occasional strings) initially reinforces Jack’s sorrow. However, it’s able to change pitch and tone to layer in elements of soaring power to rouse you in the film’s inspirational moments.
Whenever you’re doing a sporting film, fans can experience the ‘uncanny valley’ not unlike CG that looks almost – but not quite – authentically human. Sports films can create stirring drama and then do something in a game they are staging that instantly distracts and frustrates. When Rocky and Apollo swing and miss in “Rocky” you hang on because you care and Bill Conti’s score maintains the rage. On the other hand, watching Matt Damon pretend even to know what sport he was playing in “Invictus” hurt my brain.
In that respect O’Connor’s direction of the performance of the game of basketball is unparalleled. The scrappy imperfect quality of high school ball, is executed to perfection. O’Connor oscillates between the action and Jack’s growing stature and embrace of the role as a coach, and his execution mirrors his commitment.
Screenwriters Brad Ingelsby and O’Connor are incredibly delicate with the unravelling of how Jack arrived at the man we see today, that to discuss it with more depth would unnecessarily spoil it. I will say that so many films look for a single defining event to prescribe an outlook. Ingelsby and O’Connor take the time to articulate the impact of a lifetime of reflexive self-destructive tendencies and hardship, and in doing so make for a deep emotional minefield.
Michela Watkins plays Jack’s sister Beth. She is begrudgingly aware that her brother is mid-spiral and her strain to temper her impulse to intervene, knowing full well that it could have negative consequences. Watkins is so deliberately measured; her gaze speaks volumes. Jack’s ex-wife Angela is played by Janina Gavankar. Angela shows the audience that Jack’s pain spiral is masochistic. Her exit from their marriage is a means of self-preservation because his despair is a contagion.
The team of students in “The Way Back” are at once a terrifically functional cohort for the story and a group of actors that feel genuine. Brandon (the team’s star and captained played by Brandon Wilson), Marcus Parish (the team pariah in need of an ego adjustment played by Melvin Gregg) and Kenny Dawes (the team’s scrappy, bandana-wearing lothario played by Will Ropp) get the most time amongst the troupe. “The Way Back” isn’t some forced “Dangerous Minds” nonsense though, propagating stereotypes and white saviour myth hand in glove. These are young men yearning for discipline, that indescribable winning feeling. Al Madrigal plays assistant coach Dan, the even keel to Jack’s verbose and grating totem on the side-lines.
The trust between Affleck and O’Connor has reflected in a committed raw performance from the leading man. In “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” Rick Dalton begins his make-up ritual after plunging his face into iced water and reducing that booze bloat. O’Connor’s heroic framing of Jack is contrapuntal. Affleck’s blotchy, tired, and puffy face is the melancholic canvas of the movie.
Before this moment his most raw and personal moment on screen was Chuckie from “Good Will Hunting”. Chuckie and Jack are both in construction. Chuckie accepts his life, on in which the pass to fulfilment is the happiness and success of the people he loves. Jack is here in spite, his Irish-Catholic resolve turned cannibalistic. He’s fulfilling Chuckie’s nightmare – knowingly sabotaging his winning lottery ticket of sporting talent.
Affleck’s performance nakedly conveys the serenity with which Jack marches towards oblivion. Alcohol abuse is somewhat in my DNA. Whether it’s the extremity of constant shameful consumption or the cataclysmic binge; the window for enjoyment is so narrow and frightening that I walk it perilously. Dysfunctional Catholic families treat each other like shit and use the virtue of forgiveness as the etch-a-sketch reset button to clean the slate. The slate, to be clear, is not clean. That drives one towards the dangerous impulse to self-medicate.
Shame, guilt, these are deeply ingrained in Catholics, I should know. However, O’Connor gives us a practitioner of faith in Jeremy Radin’s Father Mark Whelan – the team’s chaplain – as the conscience of the film. In basketball parlance, Radin’s supporting role gets one scene to crush an impossible three-point shot from half-court, and it hits that exultant swish.
“The Way Back” is a strange and beautiful expression of meta-textual entanglement. As a coach, one of the mantras of Affleck’s Jack often shouts to his players “play like you got a chip on your shoulder”. One could say that of Affleck’s career, but I would say it about his very best work. “Good Will Hunting,” “Gone Girl,” “Gone Baby Gone,” “The Town,” “Argo” and even his first go-round as the Batman – his collaborators let that underestimation course through the DNA of the characters on screen. It’s impossible to distance Affleck from Jack, from the possibility for redemption and Affleck’s rollercoaster career. Perhaps that’s the answer to the power of “The Way Back”. One thing’s for sure; it utterly destroyed me.
