When I was 11 years old, September in 2010 if I remember correctly, I was diagnosed with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis. I couldn’t walk. My white blood cell count was too high. They thought I had Leukemia. My parents looked at me from the corner with solemn eyes, preparing to tell me the worst, thinking the worst. A few days later they were given the lesser of two evils – they would much rather I have something they’ve never heard of than a disease everyone has.
There was a kid next to me however, sitting in the same spot I was, just a few feet to my left behind a long series of delicate drapes. This kid, I will always remember. I never saw his face. I only heard his voice. He was the same age as me from what I remember in the same spot as me. They thought he had Leukemia too, his parents comforting him closely while mine avoided me. We talked about baseball. We talked about moves. When I left the hospital a few days later, he stayed there in the same spot, awaiting his diagnosis. Our parents kept in touch and I always wondered what happened to him. It turns out, he had Leukemia.
A few years later he died.
There was something that my mom would say to me, sitting on the edge of my bed, leaning over, not knowing my future. “God does everything for a reason. God has a plan for you.” The Way Back isn’t a religious film by any means. It’s set at a Catholic high school, with frequent jokes surrounding Affleck’s vitriol-fueled tongue spouting f-bombs at dopey teens in front of a devout coach. Yet, there is a scene that is similar to my experience, the devout coach giving a piece of religious wisdom to a broken man told to accept his pain instead of turning his back.
Hollywood has always carried the great comeback card for years. Most recently, McConaughey and Keanu came back from a string of commercial and critical favors for one to win an Oscar and the other to be a national hero. Other times the comeback story deals with more personal issues, where Downey Jr. went from former star to drug addict back to the biggest star in the world. Yet, there’s something fascinating about the comeback of Affleck, a man who seemingly has been awarded a million comebacks. This is the guy who is the youngest man to ever win best original screenplay, a feat he shares with his Boston childhood friend Matt Damon. This is also the man who became the next big hotshot with the success of Armageddon before starring in flops like Gigli and Daredevil. He then went back on the wagon and became a successful actor turned director before reaching the apotheosis of career and winning his second Oscar, this time for Best Picture. Then he went off the wagon again, both literally and figuratively, before staring up the mountain again and trudging up the hill once more. Affleck looks bigger and more dilapidated than ever, with oversized plaid shirts and sweats hanging off his knees. He doesn’t move like a normal person, rather one that carries the weight of his past as well as the weight of his beer. He has given up, pouring vodka into a thermos, drinking on the edge of a mile-high construction set before going to drink his life away at the local dive-in.
And so yes, The Way Back crushed me. When he drinks thirty beers, tapping the top, what was once a tick and is now a pattern, drinking himself away instead of making one call and confronting a painful decision, all because of a dead child, you believe it. You believe the pain, you believe the repression, and you believe what Affleck and O’Connor are selling. The Way Back may be a straightforward sports film but it’s also a film about the repression of pain and the failure to forward. Now whether it’s you or me, I have seen the trailer approximately 30 times, basking in the pretension of the perfect “Sad Affleck” movie. However, what we get is something tender, straightforward, a little sad, a little hopeful, and a movie that ultimately tore me apart. It’s not a revelatory picture by any means. It knows the beats better than you know the back of your hand and yet frustratingly, it doesn’t shy away from them. He moves the boulder of the hill and it falls back down in the end just for him to roll it back up at the end. Yet the patience and unnerving lead performance make for a film that works because as Scott Tobias writes “O’Conner believes in this stuff and it makes a difference.”
3.5/5 STARS