Compelling, (Somewhat) Accurate Film

Rating: 8/10 (27 March 2018)

Peter Weir's The Way Back is a film chronicling a group of Gulag escapees' journey to freedom in India. While I found the film enjoyable and mostly accurate to the characteristics of the Soviet Union's Gulag camp system, I must acknowledge that the story's origin is a bit fuzzy. The film was based on a nonfiction book The Long Walk, which has been disputed. Although there are records of one or two groups of Gulag escapees turning up in India, the author of the book, who claimed to have accomplished this feat, did not actually escape a Gulag.
While the origins of the story may not have been accurate, the depiction of the Gulag camp was accurate for the most part. For instance, Valka, the criminal character, had the authority in the barrack, which was true of most Gulags as guards tended to let criminals keep order. As was discussed in the film in the mining scene, heavy labor like mining work was fatal-it was just a matter of time before the inmate met their demise. Though comical, Valka's chest tattoo of Lenin and Stalin provides a good example of the blind loyalty to Stalin during World War II. Many inmates believed that their being in the Gulag was benefitting the regime and still held intense loyalty for the Communist government that had usually wrongly arrested them in the first place. Where this film fell short was showing how insanely fatal the Gulags were, especially in Siberia. Although we get a sense of the bitter conditions and their lethality in the scene where the guards allow the prisoners to take shelter in the forest away from the blizzard, I think that the film could have expanded upon how deadly a sentence to a camp like the one in The Way Back would have been.
Straying from my discussion of historical accuracy, I must acknowledge that, as a viewer, the film seemed to drag on at points, especially as the group trekked across the desert. Despite this, when I think back on the film, I wonder if the long time in the desert was of some artistic significance. I wonder if Weir consciously chose to have the scene go on and on to mirror how the escapees kept walking and walking and never seemed to make much progress through the desert.