An element of stifled pain in Ben Affleck’s gaze dominates the drama of “The Way Back,” which opens Friday, and nearly renders the film’s absurdities and shortcuts moving and coherent. It’s a redemption-through-sports movie that doesn’t offer enough about sports or redemption, a coping-through-grief tale that, far from confronting the anguish on which it’s based, treats it only as one piece in a narrative jigsaw puzzle.
Affleck plays Jack Cunningham, a construction worker living alone in the small coastal California town of San Pedro. He goes to work, drives to a bar called Harold’s Place, and drinks alone—until, inexplicably late in the movie, it’s revealed that he actually knows more or less everyone in the place and engages them in sloshy bar talk. He then goes home, to an apartment up a flight of rickety steps, and drinks some more. He has a cell phone but doesn’t carry it—he leaves it at home, using it only as an answering machine, the better to ignore the friends and family members who call to check up on him. Jack arrives drunk at the house of his sister (Michaela Watkins) and her family on Thanksgiving, and continues drinking throughout the meal; he bristles when she mentions Angela (Janina Gavankar), his wife, from whom he’s separated, and he reacts aggressively when she confides in him that a mutual friend is worried about his drinking.
Drinking en route to his job, and drinking from a metal cannister on the job, Jack is clearly heading for disaster. But, one day, he comes home to an odd phone message, one that he chooses to respond to: he’s summoned to the office of Father Edward Devine (John Aylward), an elderly priest who’s also the headmaster of Bishop Hayes, the Catholic school from which Jack graduated, in 1995. Jack was, it turns out, a basketball star who led the team to a championship; now Father Devine asks him to step in, immediately, as the coach of the boys’ team. (The former coach suffered a heart attack.) At home that night, Jack kills a dozen or more cans of beer while crafting the phrasing of his refusal—but then agrees to take the job.
The team that Jack inherits is terrible and demoralized; the players achieve little and don’t take their playing, training, or team discipline very seriously. At first, Jack’s own casual attitude—and his pent-up rage, and his long-suppressed (yet, until far into the movie, utterly unexplained) pain—get in the way of his responsibilities. But when he’s reminded by the team chaplain (Jeremy Radin) of the impact that he can have on the players’ lives he buckles down—as a coach and a person—and, with a combination of sports savvy, shrewd motivational psychology, and tough love, he turns his players thoughtful, disciplined, and confident. He also transforms them into a winning team—that is, until his own unresolved problems get in the way. The background to those problems—what Jack knows about himself, what he thinks about more or less constantly, what motivates most of his actions—is revealed only in pieces, and that unfurling is timed as spectacularly and as manipulatively as “Wheel of Fortune” letters, making the movie a minefield of spoilers.
The director of “The Way Back,” Gavin O’Connor, doesn’t appear to care about basketball—he cares about sports as a metaphor, even as a dramatic device, but not as an experience. The movie’s best scene is the one that sticks closest to the actual subject of Jack’s work with the team: his first coaching session, in which he prompts the assistant coach, Dan Espinosa (Al Madrigal), a math teacher, to describe the players’ personalities and abilities, one by one, and then takes action in practice to reorganize the team. But, once O’Connor and the screenwriter, Brad Ingelsby, define Jack’s coaching bona fides, they then drop the emphasis on process in order to connect sports to character—to show Jack making a difference in the lives of his players. In particular, he concentrates on his star player, Brandon (Brandon Wilson), trying to instill him with self-confidence while also helping him repair his troubled relationship with his father (T. K. Carter), in an effort to spare him the cycle of familial conflict and anger that damaged Jack.
As Jack takes to his role as coach, mentor, and even surrogate father for his players, he’s also able to drastically decrease his drinking. But, eventually, he relapses and—following an incident that begins with drunk driving, involves a traffic accident, and veers into what can be called (with spoiler avoidance) an accidental home invasion—enters rehab.
This twist of events would have been as likely to get another character—such as a poor person, an immigrant, or a person of color—arrested, deported, even shot. But when Jack bottoms out his landing is seriously cushioned. He ends up in a rehab facility reminiscent of a rustic resort, and, though he gets the helpful and respectful treatment that all substance abusers deserve, Jack—and the filmmakers—seem unaware that there’s anything exceptional, surprising, or even noteworthy about it.
Jack’s lack of self-awareness—of his identity and of the world he lives in—results from O’Connor’s over-all directorial strategy, or lack of one. With “The Way Back,” the filmmaker falls into the familiar trap of depicting working-class characters as virtually devoid of discourse or ideas. Jack’s barroom talk is a couple of sour jokes; his discussions with his family and friends are limited to the strictest dictates of the plot. Jack offers no perspective on his construction work or his coaching, let alone the state of the world and his place in it. He is merely the bearer of his misfortunes, the mentor to his players, and the beneficiary of his sister’s and his milieu’s generosity and forgiveness. “The Way Back” is a movie that resembles a work of serial TV, constructed episodically, as if for Quibi, in act-bites of a few minutes each, with each drop of information delivering a dramatic climax and then leading instantly back to the next actlet. With its jolts of affecting disclosures, it’s a melodrama that doesn’t want to be one, made with such a fear of the ridiculous (the edge of the ridiculous being the stock in trade of melodrama) that O’Connor leaves its emotional expression submerged; the movie’s air of melancholy reserve comes as much from what it hides as from what it shows.
Strangely, “The Way Back” isn’t the only oblivious depiction of working people which gets wide release this week. When it comes to stick figures with many misfortunes and little discourse, Jack is virtually Shakespearean compared with the ciphers, presented by the director Ken Loach and the screenwriter Paul Laverty, in the new film “Sorry We Missed You,” which opened on Wednesday. It’s a drama about the agonies inflicted by the gig economy on one family in northeastern England, the Turners.
Ricky (Kris Hitchen), who has worked in construction and landscaping, gives up that work in order to become a delivery driver for a firm where he has no salary or hourly wage but is paid per package and per delivery. He has to invest in a van—and, to do so, he persuades his wife, Abbie (Debbie Honeywood), to sell her car. She’s a home health aide, deeply devoted to the patients in her care, and she, too, is only paid per visit. Now she’s relegated to taking the bus, shortening the time she can spend on each visit and greatly lengthening the time of her commute. Suddenly, both Abbie and Ricky are away from home for unusually long times, and can’t adequately supervise their children—the teen-age Seb (Rhys Stone) and the primary-school student Liza Jane (Katie Proctor).
The dramatic principle of “Sorry We Missed You” is Murphy’s Law. Warned in advance by his hard-nosed and boastful boss (Ross Brewster) of a variety of fines and penalties for which he risks becoming liable, Ricky finds himself subject to seemingly all of them. When customers refuse to sign for deliveries, or packages are mislabelled, when Ricky’s van is damaged while he’s not in it, when a police officer orders him away from the site of a delivery, when a dog nearly takes a piece out of him, when he’s assaulted and robbed—every difficulty leads to either an out-of-pocket expense or a fine from the delivery firm. Meanwhile, Seb, a talented artist whose preferred medium is graffiti, starts getting into trouble, and Liza Jane, who’s feeling abandoned, starts acting out; with each difficulty faced by Abbie’s patients and each late night or early morning or weekend assignment required of Ricky, the mutual dependencies of family life are stressed to the breaking point.
Loach’s empathy for the Turners, and, in particular, for Ricky, to whom the movie sticks most closely, is more than evident—it’s flagrant and artificial. Loach makes viewers feel virtuous about feeling bad, and few viewers are likely to be immune to the concern that he arouses. Yet he does so by removing the complex humanity from the working-class characters he seeks to exalt. Even more than O’Connor in “The Way Back,” Loach stands loftily above his protagonists and presents them to the audience like he’s their impresario, representative, and spokesperson, carefully filtering their personalities and suppressing their voices so stringently as to leave no substance. Ricky and Abbie have no politics, no amusements, no friends, no talk of wider acquaintances, little to say about the world they live in or the people they know. Brexit? They don’t say. Their neighborhood? It may as well be a green-screen backdrop. Where “The Way Back” turns each revelation into a muted spectacle, “Sorry We Missed You” treats its story as revelation, as the unvarnished and unimpeachable truth, the gospel truth. The faux modesty of Loach’s styleless style has the arrogance of a self-nomination for sainthood.
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“The Way Back” and “Sorry We Missed You,” Reviewed: Two Oblivious Depictions of the Working Class - The New Yorker
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