There’s a montage sequence in Gavin O’Connor’s “The Way Back” that presents a fascinating distillation of alcoholism. Rather than exteriorising the physical effects and manifesting Jack Cunningham’s progressive drunkenness by actions, O’Connor focuses on the act of him repeatedly going to the fridge and opening a can of beer. Soon, each successive click of the beer-can, set against Rob Simonsen’s agitated score, begins to feel morbid. By the end of the brief sequence, a fridge full of beer has dwindled to two, and a slow pan to a floor of discarded cans feels gently illuminating. The scene, specific in focus but unfussy and subdued in its progression is central to the structural and thematic elements at work in “The Way Back”.
That subdued tone is critical to O’Connor’s work here, especially in the film’s first hour which teases a variety of potential ways the narrative can go before settling on something more serious, and less comforting, than you anticipate. The film’s opening scene is a two-minute stretch that projects the weariness of a man living a shuttered life. Jack makes his way through a construction shift and then drives home, while drinking a beer. His eyes look out at the road, and there’s nothing behind them. The last scene before the title-credit appears is a bleak shower-scene that seems to go on too long, drawing out the barrenness of this man’s life.
Brad Ingelsby’s screenplay gives us information incrementally. Jack is separated from his wife. He was once a promising high-school basketball star. He enjoys a tense, but not unloving relationship with an older sister. And his life is empty. The film seems to reveal its focus when early on he’s offered a part-time job as the coach of his old high-school’s basketball team. The moment seems to, at first, promise a standard tale of personal redemption through sports. Except the offer of that job comes immediately before that telling montage of Jack’s obsessive relationship with beer. He does take the job, but the choice seems shrouded in unease. And for some of the middle act, “The Way Back” imitates a sports-drama as Jack, for a time, stops drinking and works at whipping the errant basketball team into shape. But for all its modest intentions, “The Way Back” is atypical, even in its sedateness. As Jack manages the team’s improvement, O’Connor and Ingelsby are slowly eking out the story of this man and an arc with his soon-to-be ex-wife (Janina Gavankar) makes for a critical revelation halfway through the film.
The mid-film plot-turn is the film’s own half-time moment as it restructures our focus into recognising that this is not positioned as an ensemble sports film but, instead, a specific tale of a man eking out a path for himself. It makes sense that the original title for Ingelsby’s initial script was “The Has-Been”. In some ways, then, Ben Affleck seems an unusual choice for such a character-heavy role. His biggest successes have always been behind the camera, his performances rarely the central calling-card of his respective films. “The Way Back” challenges that idea.
Affleck’s performance as Jack Cunningham is a searing portrayal of a man who is a human wreckage. Affleck’s public persona has taken a few hits in the last few years, and the memefication of pop-culture has made him the butt of easy jokes about everything from his weight-gain to his divorce from Jennifer Garner to his struggles with addiction. In many ways, Jack Cunningham feels like the kind of star turn that deftly leverages the ideas of Affleck as a celebrity and as an established Hollywood player.
Affleck is excellent both for the things he does and the things he does not do. O’Connor’s direction is hewn to the performance so there’s no telling how much we see is the director’s penchant for underplaying and how much is Affleck’s well calibrated performance. But his Jack is progressively fascinating for the ways the portrayal avoids your expectations of grieving, alcoholism or stolidity. Because Affleck chooses to underplay so much, the brief – but sharp – moments where he lashes out feel propulsive and dangerous. The first is a brief moment opposite an excellent Michaela Watkins (who plays against type in a brief but well-calibrated performance as his sister). Ingelsby’s script is slowly building up our knowledge of this man so the mid film revelation of the why of his psychology feels natural and impactful when it happens. O’Connor’s work benefits from his lack of sentiment, and the film’s craft follows suit. Edward Grau, who did similarly reflective work in “Boy Erased” in 2018, shoots the personal plot and the basketball scenes with a laidback warmth that does not confuse sedateness with ambivalence.
The argument could be made that “The Way Back” is better as a character study of a specific man than it is as a complete film – and in some ways it falls a bit short of the O’Connor’s “Tumbleweeds” where he’s able to make a specific story feel more expansive, but “The Way Back” has more for it going than just Affleck. What Ingelsby’s script and O’Connor’s direction are able to capture is the vividness of the lives of the people who inhabit this world, even when they exist on the periphery. It’s as much the actors, as the way the direction makes this restless world feels lived-in and authentic even if you wish it dug a bit more into the socioeconomic implications of the basketball and the potential racial-dynamics of the game. Young actors Melvin Gregg and Brandon Wilson are particularly impressive at carving distinct characters out of their roles as showboating-jock and responsible-team-captain. And the original score from Simonsen is empathetic, evoking the sense of restless sadness that’s critical to Jack’s journey.
By the end, “The Way Back” makes for an unusual but rewarding mix between character study and sports drama. There’s a fade-to-black thirty minutes before the film ends that feels like a natural ending for another type of movie, until O’Connor reminds you that this isn’t the film that we’re expecting. By the time the ending sequence comes, as subdued and meditative as the film that’s come before, “The Way Back” has earned our respect as something thoughtful and precise in its focus. And by that time the very last shot of Affleck’s Jack Cunningham feels like a revelation of a different man than the one we started out with but also like a revelation of the kind of performance that we didn’t know Ben Affleck was capable of.
The Way Back is available for streaming and purchase on Vudu, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu and other streaming services.
