Director Peter Weir’s last film, 2003’s Master and Commander, was to sea epics what The Lord of the Rings was to sword and sorcery. High adventure tinged with metaphysical overtones is still Weir’s style. It’s a style that holds sway over Australian filmmakers; even The Animal Kingdom is influenced by this director’s early attempts to tell stories with tantalizing passages missing and his methods for filming a sun-stricken landscape. It’s as if Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock had been made last year instead of in 1975.
Weir’s newest, The Way Back, is an adventure about an escape from one of Stalin’s Gulags during the 1940s; the prisoners fled on foot from Siberia to the Himalayas (and beyond). Weir has been the best director some actors have ever had—Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Jim Carrey and Robin Williams among them—and Colin Farrell joins the ranks in The Way Back. Getting to play a Russian is a gift to actors, and Farrell is a salty delight as a tattooed criminal who forces his way into the escape attempt. He revs up the film with an ingratiating accent and hard-bitten mottos: “Grateful is for dogs!”
The Way Back excels in passages. Just right is the scene in which an imprisoned actor recites Treasure Island to a group of shaven-headed gangsters. The frost of white whiskers on Ed Harris’ chin makes him look like an old but still dangerous lion. When the prisoners are mining coal, amid mechanical roars and belching steam hoses, Weir shows us how to film confusion without making it look confused. The problem is that The Way Back sometimes looks like it’s missing reels, even though the desert part of the ordeal goes overlong. And the script has lines that come up in high-adventure films so regularly that the audience could prompt the actors. Weir approaches this purportedly true-life memoir as if it’s all true. (A tip-off might have been the way the book’s author, Slawomir Rawicz, described his encounter with a pair of yetis along the journey.)
Ultimately, The Way Back is almost a masterpiece, dampened by Weir’s straightforward tale-telling when he might well have shaded this film’s burning suns with a shadow of a doubt. (Peter Weir comes to San Jose on Wednesday, Jan. 19, at 7:30pm to host a Silicon Valley Jewish Film Festival benefit screening of The Way Back.)—Richard von Busack
The Way Back
PG-13; 133 min.
