Power is Something You Take

Rating: 9/10 (5 April 2013)

Any film directed by Peter Weir would draw my immediate attention. Co-Writer, director and producer of "The Way Back," Weir is responsible for other great films: "Dead Poets Society," "The Year of Living Dangerously," "Gallipoli," and "The Truman Show."
A masterpiece, this film is a powerful testament to the power of human bonding, the drive to survive no matter what, and the power of love to overcome terror and hatred, which Hitler boasted would always overcome reason. This is a move about why Hitler's thesis did not work.
It is interesting to turn from my viewing of The History Channel's new series, "The Bible," which like the Bible, like our world now, is extremely violent. The men who escape from a Siberian nightmare turn hatred inside out, creating their own ethos. Like a palimpsest, which can never fully be erased, allows these survivors to write over its surfade a new image, a new version, a new vision,the next chapter of their lives free from the tyranny that threatened to snuff out everything that mattered. As Martin Luther King, Jr., warned, "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
Ed Harris, who has always impressed me, whether he is portraying a haunted gunslinger or Senator John McCain, is at the very top of his form in this film. The furrows of his brow tell a tale, even the way he is dressed, the sapphire diamonds in his gaze, symbolize physical, mental and moral toughness. His repeated refrain, that "Kindness can get you killed," continues to take on new and more gentle import as the story unfolds, almost like shifting waves of sand in the endless, scorching Gobi Desert.
Mark Strong who, in my opinion, along with James Gandalfini, saved "Dark Night Thirty," from mediocrity, giving it the believability it lacked until they entered the story, is intense, laconic, commanding instant respect every time he speaks. That is a challenge to accomplish in this cast, in this story, where each man becomes a sort of resurrected piston in a rebuilt engine comprised of cast-offs, rejects, the detritus of the maniacal fury of Hitler and Stalin.
The story begins when Hitler and Stalin, like ravenous wolves, each tear their half out of Poland, and many who do not immediately perish, are cruelly thrust into a Gulag in Siberia. A small cluster of canny would-be-survivors escapes. That's the easy part. One of them knows how to survive in the wilds, using pine cones and other surprising tricks that work. Together, they find enough food and water, survive disease and infection, traverse one of the world's most formidable deserts, and scale several Himilayan mountains to reach freedom.
The government official in India who greets them asks for their passports. They smile. "How did you get here?" "We walked," the men respond.
Our world has endured financial collapse, avaricious, high tech, democracy-wrecking criminals who did not go to jail, zealots who place fanaticism before the brotherhood of man, woman and child. This is a movie to reflect upon. We are alive. Now what?
Shakespeare's Edgar, a noble survivor in "King Lear," mutters, "This is not the worst as long as we can say, 'This is the worst.'" We are alive. So what? The men and the woman in this story did not knuckle under to Hitler or Stalin. They did not die suffering unmitigated horrors in the Gulag. They blazed a new way, new lives.
A Russian thug, a comic accountant, a pastry chef who is an accomplished artist, a priest, a pole with night blindness, and another condemned pole who knows how to live in the wilds and leads them all.
Hitler killed 6,000,000 Jews. Stalin made 50,000,000 people "disappear." We must never forget. Demagogues beware: As John Steinbeck warned, "Repression tends to knit the repressed."