The way back is the way forward
Siberia. The Gulag. These are words and places that denote isolation and human deprivation on a scale that most of us cannot imagine. Director Peter Weir, best known for Dead Poets Society (1989) has chosen this setting for an epic escape tale.
The Way Back features Ed Harris, Colin Farrell and Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe, 21) in an ensemble piece reputed, but also disputed, to be based on a true story that took place in the early 1940s.
Sturgess plays the role of Janusz, a young Pole who becomes a Soviet political prisoner shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. In a memorable opening scene, a Soviet officer is trying to coerce a spying confession out of Janusz without success. Enter Janusz's wife who, clearly under great duress, denounces her husband and in the exchange of looks between husband and wife an entire story is told.
When the story shifts to the Gulag's labour camp, the prison commander informs the prisoners that their true jailer is not the barbed wire of their particular compound, but the five million square miles of Siberia. Despite the warning, Janusz and a few others calculate what it would take to escape.
Dante could add another circle to his description of hell in The Inferno if he were to explore the inner workings of the Siberian Gulag. Take away the ever-present cold, starvation rations and unending hours of slave labour in the forests or mines, and you're still left to imbibe a dizzying cocktail of cutthroat prisoners, disease, lice and blood. Fortunately, Weir does not leave us holding the glass for too long before the escape is set in motion.
Seven men escape their labour camp prison during a severe snowstorm and all rely on Janusz for his survival expertise. Charting a course towards Mongolia and eventually India is only one of the challenges facing the group, the largest of which is finding food. A vivid scene depicts the fugitives staring down a group of wolves over a fresh kill, and having driven off the predators, tearing into the flesh of the carcass in a way that differs little from the wolves.
Despite such moments, the escapees maintain a type of human dignity that would normally seem impossible in that environment, notably when Irena (Saoirse Ronan), a teenage girl who is ostensibly fleeing a Stalinist work farm, approaches the group. She is clearly vulnerable to the basest desires of men who have been cut off from physical intimacy, but instead is taken under their protective wing despite her potential to slow them on their escape.
Irena is the one to whom the others are willing to disclose their stories and secrets. As such she becomes an important link between characters as well as to the audience who are kept at something of an emotional distance from the main characters. Her function in that regard, however, can only take us so far and it is a legitimate criticism of this film that we should care more about the characters than we do. Instead of character intimacy we are left with overarching vistas of forests, lakes, mountains and deserts, and while these panoramic views remind us of the incredible odds the escapees face, they also depersonalize the film.
The singular question that underlies the journey of Janusz and his dwindling band of compatriots is determining what the motivation is that steels their wills and drives them to endlessly place one foot in front of another when it would be so much easier to succumb to the elements. The powerful desire for freedom is one answer, but in context it falls short. The unexpected answer is the need for forgiveness - both to experience it, as well as to offer it. It would give away too much of what is eventually revealed in the film to expand further, but the power of love lays claim to all the clichés of what deserts would be crossed and mountains climbed in order for it to be expressed.
This film has only had a narrow release in Canada up to this point, and it's unclear as to whether or not it will experience a wide theatrical distribution before its eventual DVD release, but it is well worth seeing when the opportunity arises.
I would rate this film two-and-a-half walking sticks out of four. This film is rated PG-13 in most parts of Canada.
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