The Way Back review – Ben Affleck battles booze in half-baked drama
There’s an irresistible external narrative attached to Warrior director Gavin O’Connor’s new alcoholism drama The Way Back: the addict at its centre is played by Ben Affleck, an actor only recently embracing sobriety. While prepping the movie, Affleck was also entering rehab and has spoken since of how playing the role was a unique form of therapy, an intriguing real-world dimension for a film that reads on paper like familiar plane movie fodder. Because the other off-screen journey is that of a project slated for an awards-friendly, festival-bowing October release yanked back to the first weekend of March, a month not typically associated with serious-minded adult dramas.
The story of an alcoholic who finds redemption by coaching a high school basketball team, The Way Back sits awkwardly between muted character study and Disney sports movie, mercifully shying away from sentimental cliche yet failing to add enough depth to work as something more substantive. It sleepily hits the beats we expect but without the emotion or passion required to make them land, a by-the-numbers exercise from someone with barely enough energy to count.
Affleck is Jack Cunningham, a former high school basketball star whose days consist of working in construction and whose nights revolve around drinking himself into a stupor. What the film does manage to successfully convey is the sheer joylessness of drinking to excess for many addicts. Often on screen, we’ll see an alcoholic start the night as the life and soul of the bar before then falling into self-pitying darkness, but there’s something bracing about that being replaced with a sort of resigned compulsiveness instead. In one of the best scenes, we see Jack spend a night at home with a fridge filled with 30-odd cans of beer. His well-rehearsed routine of placing one in the freezer while starting another leaves him with an empty fridge by the time he mumbles himself to sleep, a bleak window into his lonely weekday life.
