Review: Ben Affleck Saves Himself in The Way Back - Vanity Fair

Let me reassure you up front: Ben Affleck is okay. Oftentimes he’s better than okay—at least in Gavin O’Connor’s new film The Way Back (March 6), in which Affleck plays a morose but (mostly) friendly alcoholic trying to maintain his grip on life as he sinks further into a pit. That may sound familiar to anyone who’s followed Affleck’s own personal journey in the past few years (most recently documented in the New York Times), which gives The Way Back an unignorable meta angle; it’s as much a movie about Ben Affleck, movie star, as it is about Jack Cunningham, former high school basketball star.

For much of the film, Affleck handles his self-conscious task with a generous humility—giving a performance built not out of histrionics or big actor moments, but instead from the messy details of a man in a plateaued distress, who has found a way to just barely function in the world and then disappear each night. (A process that starts in the day—Jack is a booze at work, beer at home kind of guy.) Affleck seems to be doing a bit of self-flagellation here, a head-shaking admission of all the interior, private squalor of addiction. Watching Affleck express those secrets is cathartic in that we are perhaps watching someone’s actual catharsis happen. There’s a rich chord of understanding in Affleck’s performance, which gives O’Connor’s a depth of feeling that would otherwise be missing.

With The Way Back, O’Connor is returning to the well of Warrior, his 2011 film about MMA-fighting brothers and their stern dad that has become a modern classic of the sports drama genre. This is not the easy sweep and uplift of underdog triumph—though there is that in The Way Back. This is more about grit and darkness and verité, which O’Connor strives for at the expense of some other things. With The Way Back, O’Connor works so hard to avoid sports movie cliché that he pares the film down to something unsustainably lean. Without Affleck’s gravity, The Way Back would just drift away.

Jack Cunningham works in construction in an industrial swath of Los Angeles near the port, with its looming container cranes, all the orange glow of street lights and sad palm trees blowing in the lazy wind. O’Connor conjures a nice sense of place; Jack’s surroundings feel hopeless in that concrete-and-asphalt American way, but still kissed by some sun, a little hope. A quarter-century ago, Jack was the star player on a Catholic prep school’s basketball team. The ghost of his past greatness still gets invoked sometimes at the local bar where Jack becomes a puddle each night, but The Way Back is not really a movie about a guy furious over his lost legacy. There’s no “I coulda been a star!” speechifying. O’Connor, and Jack, are after redemption on a deeper level, more concerned with self and soul than with career.

Still, basketball does return to Jack’s life when an opportunity to coach at his old school comes calling. He’s hesitant, but takes the gig, meeting a ragtag group of boys who desperately need his help while he, of course, needs theirs. It’s here where the film starts rushing, doing a surprisingly perfunctory version of a well-worn narrative. Jack is, somehow, immediately good at coaching; he swears too much, sure, and he’s not always sober, but he knows just how to arrange these kids in various configurations, to send them on the right vectors, to make them sing on the court, exploiting individual talents to make a stronger collective.

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Review: Ben Affleck Saves Himself in The Way Back - Vanity Fair
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