Long walk to freedom

Rating: 6/10 (1 January 2014)

At the end of '1984', Winston Smith loves Big Brother. And in a documentary I saw about prison camps in Siberia, the grizzled veterans confessed that, when they learnt that Stalin had died, they cried. So my first quibble with Peter Weir's film (based on an extraordinary real life escape from such a camp) is that it conveys absolutely nothing of such psychology. The prisoners denounce Stalinism, and protest their lack of freedom, in a way that seems to better reflect modern sensitivities than the actual reality of life in the camps. Things don't get that much better once the escape is underway. To me, at least, the interesting thing about the story is logistics: how does anyone manage to live as a fugitive for months in the depths of Siberia? But I don't really get a sense of how they did it from the movie, which conveys that the men were short of food and water but presents these challenges almost in the abstract, rather than showing us the everyday discipline that allowed their ultimate survival. The film is not completely awful, yet somehow, it didn't come alive for me, unlike some books I have read about life in the camps which brought their particularities to vivid life. The story here seems more generic, and consequently, less interesting.