For his first film in seven years, Peter Weir has chosen to tell an epic tale with a panoramic sweep, in the manner of David Lean.
The Way Back is “inspired” by a true story, which unfortunately may have been itself merely “inspired” by what its author claims to be the truth. Its veracity was in question even before it was put through the movie mill.
This source material was a bestseller by the Polish army Lieutenant Slavomir Rawicz, who was imprisoned by the Soviets after their invasion of 1939, accused of spying and sent to the Siberian gulag. In his book, he claimed that with a group of other prisoners he pulled off a daring escape during a blizzard in 1941; against incredible odds this group reportedly managed the astonishing feat of trekking thousands of miles to safety in British India.
Since publication, his account has been disputed. There are suggestions that it is entirely fictional, or that Rawicz appropriated and conflated other people’s apocryphal tales. Weir has reportedly added more background material with extended research and survivor interviews of his own.
Of course, if it simply didn’t happen at all then readers and movie audiences are entitled to ask what value the story has — except as an image for humanity’s long, persistent slog away from the prison of Soviet tyranny.
This, in fact, is the idea suggested in one late sequence: a historical newsreel montage showing the Poles’ postwar communist rule, the Hungarian uprising, the Solidarity trade union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and so on, all with a pair of trudging boots at the top of the frame. But, even if disbelieved in the literal sense, The Way Back is still an engaging, old-fashioned piece of storytelling.
At its centre is Janusz, played earnestly, though also sometimes with a slightly flavourless efficiency, by the 29-year-old British actor Jim Sturgess — he is a Pole whose young wife is tortured by the Soviets into denouncing him as a spy. Janusz is sent to the Siberian gulag for 20 years, a terrifying place where the inmates are told by the commander that it is not the barbed wire, guards and dogs that make up their prison but the vast and forbidding landscape itself. (Weir may be alluding here to a very similar speech from the Japanese camp commandant at the beginning of Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai.)
Tall tales
Here Janusz meets mercurial former actor Khabarov (Mark Strong) whose tall tales of escape inspire him to make a break. Among his group are an enigmatic American, known only as “Mr Smith”, played by Ed Harris as a grizzled cynic; Zoran, played by Romanian actor Dragos Bucur; Irena, played by Saoirse Ronan, who joins them on the road; and a gangster called Valka, played by Colin Farrell, a professional criminal who joins the escape party purely to get away from other mobsters inside who want to kill him over gambling debts.
Valka is apparently set up to be the heart-of-gold low-life who is surely destined to redeem himself just before the final credits. In fact, that isn’t exactly what happens and, a little disconcertingly, Valka turns out to have a sentimental regard for Stalin. Messy, contradictory details like this, paradoxically, argue for the story’s reality.
There is something surreal in eeing the group inching like insects through the snowy wastes of Siberia, or the rippling vastness of the Gobi desert, tormented by what may or may not be mirages of oases — another pleasingly old-fashioned touch.
The Way Back is a robustly made picture, heartfelt, well executed, with an exhilarating sense of reach and narrative ambition. Where it falls down is a lack of personal intensity to match the spectacle. There is nothing interesting to discover about Janusz and nothing interesting for him to discover about himself; even the secrets disclosed about the other escapers don’t have much of an impact on the group dynamic.
Well, this isn’t an overwhelming problem. Weir has put together a good film — oddly, though, considering its scale, it feels like a rather small one.
— Guardian News & Media 2011