Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Ben Affleck’s Jack Cunningham is a just about functional alcoholic, living alone and working in the construction industry, being scraped up off the floor of the local bar and deposited home every night for the cycle to continue. His family are concerned about him, including his separated wife, but Jack’s not willing to confront his demons, just attempt to drown them in booze.
He’s given an unexpected reason to care about life when he’s called on to step in to coach his old high school basketball team, which after some soul searching he agrees to. Said team, the Bishop Hayes something-or-others, are not very good and lose a lot, and don’t work together as a team, and, well, I’m sure you see how this is going.
While Jack is putting the team on a winning path, reworking their play style to suit their strengths and ultimately challenging for the play-offs, it seems that he’s also putting his life back on a winning path, until past trauma resurfaces and knocks him back on his ass and into a bottle. Perhaps the main deviation from formula in The Way Back is that it’s not exactly presenting a simple character redemption arc and a happy ending, as much as the overbearingly schmaltzy music would have it, instead it’s offering the possibility of a happy ending, for both Jack and also his team.
A lot of the story and a lot of the characters we’ll meet in The Way Back will have some degree of familiarity to anyone who’s been watching films for any length of time, but that’s not say that the classics don’t continue to work. The kids prove to be a fairly endearing bunch, and while the “being whipped into shape” sequence isn’t winning originality awards it’s a fun stretch, bookended by a pretty solid performance from Batman as a believably traumatised man incapable or unwilling to deal with his grief.
I don’t think I’ve a lot more to say about The Way Back other than perhaps to emphasise that I enjoyed it a great deal. Sure, as I’ve repeatedly mentioned it’s not breaking any molds, but it’s a really solidly put together movie and it’s well worth adding to your shortlist.