The Long, Long Journey

Rating: 10/10 (26 November 2011)

Australian Peter Weir is one of the great artists and craftsmen in cinema of the past 40 years. As a storyteller he seems interested in the the plight of the stranger in a strange land, the man who stumbles into a world where he is totally out of his element and the rules of the society he knows and believes in no longer apply. The two films that brought him to the world stage, "Picnic at Hanging Rock" (1975) and "The Last Wave" (1977) depict the fragility of our civilization as it crashes full tilt into a spiritual world that exists beyond time and space and rational comprehension. In the truly wonderful "Witness" (1985), violent cop Harrison Ford, wounded and pursued by crooked cops, hides out in an Amish community in Pennsylvania. A real fish out of water tale. I saw this film on its opening in a packed Toronto theatre. There was such a hush from the audience I swear you could hear a pin drop, and at the end the entire audience broke into spontaneous and prolonged applause. Okay, pardon my digression. I once knew someone knowledgeable who illuminated some of Weir's earlier films for me and helped to made that director a personal favourite.
In "The Way Back" (2010) a group of political prisoners and one bona fide crook and con artist, in Stalin's Russia ca. 1948, escape from a prison camp in Siberia. Their journey takes them across frozen Siberia, the Gobi desert and the Himalayas to their ultimate destination, India and freedom. Some of them don't make it. The elements are the enemy. The film does a fine job of juxtaposing the most minuscule details with the vastness and harsh beauty of the landscapes (the photography is by Oscar-winner Russell Boyd). Along the way the men discover that the world they once took for granted has been recast in the molds of the hammer-and-sickle and the red star. Colin Farrell plays the hard-done-by con man who, nevertheless, will brook no mockery of his tattoo of Stalin. Ed Harris plays an American known simply as Mr. Smith, a grumpy old bear and an expert at survival, who harbours a deep hurt. He's the weight at the movie's core. Jim Sturgess is the new guy, a Polish army officer and resident artist, who has an especially compelling reason for making it back. Then there is the persistent, stray young woman (Saoirse Ronan) whom the men, some grudgingly (a laggard and another mouth to feed), allow to tag along. Observant, talkative and direct, she brings the healing power of conversation to the men and a much-appreciated softer texture to the movie.
"The Way Back" has a feel to it reminiscent of the epic films of David Lean ("Lawrence of Arabia", "Doctor Zhivago", "A Passage to India") and Steven Spielberg's "Empire of the Sun". It's a nice change from the testosterone-charged epics currently ruling the box office. Weir hasn't culled a melodramatic storyline from the true-life material he is working from. The struggle to survive, physically and spiritually, seems dramatic enough, and the movie is never plodding or boring. It's been edited to just the right length, a trim two-and-a-quarter hours. The Himalayan leg of the journey is quickly dispensed with because, after all, the story that Peter Weir wanted to tell has been told by that point. Well, almost. The journey is not over. Using "walking" as the movie's predominant metaphor, there is a bold and thrilling final sequence that made me gasp with delight. It's a leap of the imagination that few movies manage to take.
For anyone who likes "The Way Back" I can't recommend highly enough the 2003 mountain-climbing survival movie "Touching the Void", a dramatization of a true story. Go out of your way to get hold of it.