Peter Weir (2010)
Peter Weir doesn’t make that many films: The Way Back is only his thirteenth feature since his 1974 debut The Cars That Ate Paris. Apart from Picnic at Hanging Rock and, especially, The Year of Living Dangerously, I’ve never been a fan of his work but Weir’s nearly-unbroken record of middlebrow, commercially successful fare that often gets noticed at awards time is rather formidable (Witness, Dead Poets Society, Green Card, Fearless, The Truman Show, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World). It’s doubtful if The Way Back will keep up this run: this is Weir’s first film since Master and Commander and the seven-year interval is the longest in his career to date. I don’t know how long he’s been planning this project but it may be that he’d over-thought it by the time he wrote the screenplay with Keith Clarke and filming got underway.
Based on the true story (but see below) of a group of men who escaped from a Siberian gulag in 1940 and trekked four thousand miles to freedom, you feel a bit guilty being unkind about The Way Back but only because it must have required a lot of hard work from a lot of people. Weir seems anxious to avoid triumph-of-the-human-spirit conventionality but, with no psychological depth or documentary detail to replace the obvious way of making this kind of picture, he and it are stranded. A mixture of pomposity and lack of confidence is evident from the start: an on-screen legend tells us that the film is dedicated to ‘the three men’ who emerged after their marathon journey from the Himalayas into India in 1941. Even if you’ve not read about The Way Back or seen the trailer, you’ll soon discover that more than three started out from the gulag – so the effect of the legend is to start you wondering which three will survive and, as the escapees’ ordeal continues, who’ll drop off next. One of the few, incidental pleasures of disaster movies in the 1970s was guessing which of the stars would and wouldn’t survive and, with even less to keep you interested in The Way Back, the same syndrome is at work here. I doubt Peter Weir meant to encourage his audience to watch the film so frivolously.
Weir delivers a matching schlocky conclusion to the film. At the then-there-were-four stage, we’re told that one of the quartet, the anti-Stalinist dissident Janusz, will never be able to return to Poland for as long as it’s under communist rule (even though this is shortly after the country’s invasion by Germany as well as the Soviet Union). At this point of the story, the men have found sanctuary in a mountain monastery in Tibet and been advised by their hosts to stay there for the winter but Janusz feels compelled to ‘keep walking’. After his arrival in India with his two other companions (complete with the heavy-handed light relief of comically benign Indian officials, who ask for the men’s passports then decide they’re perhaps unnecessary in the circumstances), Weir inserts a remarkably crass epilogue. He assembles newsreel of key events in post-1945 Eastern European political history, from the descent of the Iron Curtain to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. Down the middle of the screen, intersecting with the newsreel, is the image of a foot in motion – to make sure that we get the point that the long walk to freedom from communist tyranny extended years beyond the miles covered by Janusz in the early 1940s. There’s no indication of where Janusz has spent the intervening half-century but, once Poland is free, he returns to the same little house where his wife – who has never forgiven herself for giving evidence against her husband to the Stalinist authorities (after they’d tortured her) – has been loyally awaiting his return. (The veracity of The Long Walk, the memoir on which the screenplay is based, appears to be a matter of dispute but there’s evidently no doubt that its ‘author’ Slawomir Rawicz married an Englishwoman in 1947 and settled in Nottingham[1].) The man playing the older Janusz (Irinei Konstantinov) is utterly unrecognisable from his younger self but we’re in Odysseus’s dog territory and the reunited old couple embrace. If Peter Weir had set out to devise a cheesy Hollywood climax, he could hardly have topped this.
Not surprisingly, it’s Janusz who’s presented as the embodiment of the fugitives’ spirit and determination. Jim Sturgess, who plays him, epitomises the no man’s land inhabited by The Way Back: he’s a familiar face and so lacks the force of reality that an unknown might have brought to the role; although competent, Sturgess isn’t either a sufficiently strong or distinctive actor to engage us through his performance. The same goes, on this occasion anyway, for Alexandru Potecean (as Tomasz, an artist) and Gustaf Skarsgård (as Voss, a priest). When the plan to escape from the gulag is first mooted, a man called Khabarov – an actor who’s been imprisoned for playing an aristocrat and making the man likeable – is one of the prime movers. He’s played by Mark Strong, who I was looking forward to see on the journey, but I’d nodded off at the point at which the breakout happened and Strong had disappeared when I came to. That leaves only three of the escaped prisoners who register strongly – Colin Farrell (in a predictably, crudely attention-seeking way – he plays the ‘bad boy, in the gulag for common crimes rather than political reasons), Ed Harris and Dragos Bucur.
Harris is Mr Smith, a grizzled, hard-bitten American – he emigrated to the Soviet Union during the Great Depression. Bucur is Zoran, a Slav whom we first see in the gulag narrating Treasure Island to the other prisoners and who, in spite of the fact that Zoran used to be an accountant, is the member of the trekkers who, in his own words, makes the others laugh. Harris and Bucur aren’t just the most striking physical presences; they have a gift for full, economical characterisation that’s beyond the other men in the cast. Harris’s remarkable bone structure is more pronounced and the reserves of furious misery in his blue eyes seem to increase with every role, even when (as in this case) it’s not a good role. Bucur was the main reason I decided to see The Way Back: as Zoran, he has a fine grin, which suggests a knowing surface silliness and an underlying shrewdness and, in his first English language part (other than what I assume was a very minor one as a bartender in Coppola’s Youth Without Youth), his readings are incisively witty. It’s hardly appropriate in the circumstances that Bucur is fleshier here than in Police, Adjective (except for Harris, all the men look too well fed); but if The Way Back results in Dragos Bucur’s getting more parts in big American films, that will be one good thing to come out of it. (In the shorter term, I was pleased that Bucur was one of the trio who made it to the finishing line.)
Although The Way Back isn’t as bad as The Lovely Bones, Saoirse Ronan is in her second big-budget dud here but she’s good enough to mean you still look forward to her being in a decent picture. As Irena, a young Polish girl on the run who hooks up with the men en route, Ronan has the only female role of any substance – Janusz’s wife (Sally Edwards and, in 1989, Meglena Karalambova) hardly counts. The role of Irena is largely functional and ridiculous. When she first appears, the men’s argument about whether they should let her join them feels generic – they might be a school gang or a screen rock band confused by the advent of a girl. (The dialogue throughout is clunky and impersonal, designed to convey information without much thought for helping to create character.) The men reveal little if anything of their pasts to each other but Irena (being a girl) finds out and imparts potted biographies to other characters and the audience. Yet some of the best bits in The Way Back involve Irena – like the moment when she runs across a partially frozen lake (to conceal the fact she can’t swim) and the men, startled and slipping, follow. Mr Smith has lost a son (killed by the Soviet government) in Moscow and Irena briefly brings out the father again in him: there’s a connection – beyond their differently magnetic blue eyes – between Ed Harris and Saoirse Ronan and Irena’s death is touching.
It may have been inattention but I couldn’t discern a logic to the use of spoken English vs English subtitles – except that the latter are soon dropped. It’s as if Weir thinks having the cast speak in Russian or Polish at the start will establish the film’s credentials as a serious piece of work and can then be dispensed with. The effect of having a multi-national cast speaking accented English means that some of the group (Bucur, Potocean, Skarsgård) do so naturally while others (Farrell and Sturgess – though not Ronan) sound relatively artificial. The fact that the fugitives don’t confide much in each other is another element of The Way Back that sounds potentially interesting but turns out not to be – because Weir doesn’t attempt to dramatise the withholding of confidences or the privacy of the men, and there’s not even much tension in their relationships. On the whole, they just seem to exclaim ‘Look!’ or ‘Look out!’ every so often, as the next reprieve or disaster-threatening obstacle on their arduous journey looms up. The production companies involved in The Way Back include National Geographic Films and this must be one of the weirdest travelogue pictures ever made. You keep admiring the varied magnificence of the changing landscapes of Siberia, Mongolia, tundra, desert etc on the journey south – photographed by Russell Boyd – and thinking it’s a shame that the group can’t really take a tourist’s pleasure in them.
27 December 2010
[1] According to Wikipedia, The Long Walk was ghost-written by Ronald Downing, based on conversations with Rawicz, and published in the UK in 1956. The book ‘has sold over half a million copies worldwide and has been translated into 25 languages … In 2006, the BBC unearthed records (including some written by Rawicz himself) that showed he had been released by the USSR in 1942 and that the book may have been based on the story of another Polish soldier, Witold Gliński. In May 2009, Witold Gliński, a Polish WWII veteran living in the United Kingdom, came forward to claim that Rawicz’s story was true, but was actually an account of what happened to him, not Rawicz’.
