Pedestrian redemption, gruelling desert

Rating: Null/10 (15 April 2011)

At some point in this, our starved gulag escapees run off a pack of wolves from their prey only to assume their place. This is The Way Back in a nutshell for me, a stark film of easy contrasts, with the power to emotionally affect but not to really challenge. It goes down easy, maybe too easy.
This came and went without much fuss it seems like, which is surprising because it's a sentimental tale of redemption done in a sweeping canvas. This should be crowdpleasing in a number of ways. Criticisms of the movie write themselves I think, how the characters are set up to face predicable dilemmas, how the story told here is slight and the filmmaking often pedestrian. The part that takes place in the gulag is a particular offender in those regards, a choppy segment where details are hacked left and right to quickly establish a narrative.
The movie will pause all this for the characters to relate us with stories of how they were traumatized by the Soviet regime, they all have something to walk away from or towards and be redeemed for it and most of them do by the end. But out in the Mongolian desert the film becomes gruelling and silent. This is what I had anticipated, small figures of men smitten hard in vast, cruel landscapes.
In his book The Mystical Gaze, Richard Leonard explains about Peter Weir's films that they employ devices "that enable the spectator to ask  fundamental questions about meaning, purpose, identity, existence and the relationship of this world to worlds beyond", which is all perhaps true in theory of this film, but I experience these in very obvious ways as opposed to Weir's great films from the 70's that rewarded immersion by the introspection they required. His visual imagination now has petered out, whereas once it was flourishing with the uncanny and the mystical.
The finale is the most intriguing part of this for me. Tricly almost but it resonates with the sadness of these broken humans, how the woman has stood in place punishing herself for a lifetime for her betrayal, the man having to wait a lifetime to absolve her.