The Big Hike.

Rating: 7/10 (19 August 2013)

It takes a lot of patience to watch this long movie through. There is nothing to keep your attention glued to the screen. Nobody's head gets wrenched off. There are no high speed pursuits. Not a gun is fired. No explicit sex, not even gratuitous nudity. If the pace were any slower you'd think you were watching something by Werner Herzog.
Peter Weir has shown a taste for the deliberate and the mysterious, especially in his early films. He has a taste for landscape, a sense of place, too. Here, there is not much mystery and the landscape overwhelms the characters until, as the footage rolls along, the characters become clearer and define themselves.
In 1941, half a dozen men are penned up in a gulag in Siberia, some for good reason and some not. Conditions are utterly miserable. The men escape and trudge their way through a forest of snow-laden fir trees that looks like a Christmas card signed by Beelzebub because it's dark and dangerous. Wolves threaten. People freeze to death.
The escaped convicts must avoid any villages because there is a bounty out on them. So they steal and kill their way through the Soviet Union, past Lake Baikal, to the refuge they seek in Mongolia. Except that they find Mongolia has shaken hands with Stalin. So it's on to China, picking up the elfin Saoirse Ronan along the way, then Tibet way up in the Himalayas, then finally salvation in India among the tea pickers of Darjeeling. About half the trekkers have survived the several thousand-mile walk, ragged, filthy, starving.
Lamentably, Saoirse Ronan is not a survivor. It's too bad, too. She's a cute, pale, little pixie. I hated to see her go, not just because she was so fragile but because I could tell her from the men. That was part of the problem. We don't really know the men. We meet them in the gulag but for the most part they only exchange a few words. And when they're all covered with dirt, lice, and sweat, they all resemble each other. I could tell Ed Harris from the others, and Colin Farrel, because I've seen them before. But the main character, the one whose story we know best, the one we're supposed to identify with, is Jim Sturgess. He was a cipher to me. He handles his Russian accent well, as they all do. Russian accents aren't hard to do. They come easily to the native English speech organs, the way Irish accents do. "So vare do you tink you are GOINK, Meestair?" See?
It's not a dull movie, once you get past the introduction to the gulag and put on your pelzkappe. Some of the escapees don't change much, but some do. They begin as Darwinian survivors, every man for himself. But, little by little, they reveal themselves. Ed Harris's motto, as the cynical American, is, "There's no room for sentiment on this trip." He winds up caring for Ronan and when she gives up the ghost he can barely bring himself to leave her grave.
The final scene carries with it a weighty sense of relief. Not just because the movie is over but because the suffering is.