The Way Back
If Ben Affleck wants to be taken seriously as an actor, he would be wise to continue working with director Gavin O’Connor.
A little over three years after their surprisingly strong pairing in The Accountant, the duo re-team for The Way Back, a generally non-cliché tale of alcoholism and redemption via youth sports that’s elevated by strong performances and the power of the unseen.
Co-written by O’Connor and Brad Ingelsby (Out of the Furnace; Run All Night), the film follows Affleck’s Jack Cunningham, a former L.A. high school basketball phenom who mysteriously left the game and turned to the bottle.
Randomly offered the head coaching job at his alma mater following the former coach’s heart attack, Jack just as randomly accepts the position — after some convincing verbal rejections — and gets to work with help from straight-laced assistant coach Dan (Al Madrigal, NBC’s About a Boy).
While the basketball games are well-shot and a thrill to experience — hopefully for non sports fans, too — O’Connor side-steps repetitiveness and keeps the pace active by freeze-framing after a handful of moments to reveal each showdown’s final score.
His welcome restraint not only avoids the expected montage of progress — which still sort of happens, though with a fresh emphasis on practice and its payoffs in the games — but raises the tension and excitement of the contests that are shown in greater detail.
As the inevitably suddenly competitive season progresses, The Way Back organically weaves in Jack’s estranged wife Angela (Janina Gavankar, Blindspotting) and the (most recent) impetus for Jack’s difficulties is poetically revealed. Here and in other pivotal moments, annoying zoom-ins draw undue attention to themselves and undercut what’s up to that point been smartly-built drama, yet the rest of Jack’s post-graduation travails are laid out in a fairly natural single conversation with star player Brandon (actor-to-watch Brandon Wilson).
The expected gains and relapses inherent to would-be recovery stories are of course present, but hit harder than less-ambitious films thanks to Affleck’s committed work and the willingness of O’Connor and Ingelsby to take their time to build a truthful, emotionally-rich character study.
And yet, with a thundering finale within their reach, the filmmakers opt for a simplistic ending that leans a bit too heavily into their dedication to restraint — albeit with the part of the story that’s thus far required increasing information to work. Rather than continue building Jack’s fraught journey in this thoughtful manner, they leap forward to a forehead-smacking end, leaving more questions than answers.
Grade: B. Rated R. Now playing at AMC Classic, Biltmore Grande, and Carolina Cinemark
(Photo: Warner Bros.)
