Susan Granger’s review of “The Way Back” (Newmarket Films)
Acclaimed Australian director Peter Weir, who hasn’t made a movie since “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” (2003), chronicles the true, epic story of POWs who escaped from one of Stalin’s remote gulags in Siberia and trudged 4,000 miles to Mongolia, through the Great Wall of China, across the Gobi Desert and into the Himalayas to freedom.
Their story begins in 1939, as Janusz (Jim Sturgess) is interrogated in Poland by a Russian officer who accuses him of espionage after his wife – under torture – informed on him. Shipped off to a hard labor camp, he meets several other prisoners, including an American structural engineer, Mr. Smith (Ed Harris), who came to the Soviet Union with his son during the 1930s, along with Valka (Colin Farrell), a vicious street thug. What they have in common is a fervent desire to escape so, in the midst of a freezing snowstorm, seven of them dash off into the dense forest with Janusz demonstrating how to fashion birch-bark masks to protect their faces. With little food or equipment and no certainty of their location, they head south, constantly threatened not only by discovery but also by dehydration, starvation and hypothermia, doing whatever they have to do to survive in the brutal countryside, infested by wolves, and a mosquito-infested lake. A few predictably perish along the way, but those who remain reluctantly pick up Irena (Saoirse Ronan), a young orphan who artfully elicits personal information about each of her companions.
Adapting Slayomir Rawicz’s “The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom,” as well as other real-life accounts, Keith Clarke, director Peter Weir and cinematographer Russell Boyd filmed in Bulgaria, Morocco and India, devoting more attention to the debilitating, travelogue-like trek through the hostile, challenging landscapes than to individual characterizations, except for Janusz’ compassionate determination to return to the house he once shared with his wife, despite her betrayal.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Way Back” is an awe-inspiring 7. It’s a spectacular slog.
