Mark Reviews Movies: THE WAY BACK (2020)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 5, 2020

There's a pretty clear reversal to the usual underdog sports story happening in The Way Back. You know the one, about a team that isn't very good but becomes much better with the introduction of a new coach. Everything important usually happens on the court, the field, the rink, or whatever other location a sport may be played. The team matters more than any one individual, and everyone learns lessons from practice and the games, where the coach gets to dole out words of wisdom from the sideline or in the locker room. Those words always inspirational and have some kind of lesson about life embedded into them.

The new coach in this movie doesn't offer such speeches. He's too busy telling his high school players just to play, cussing out the referees, and trying to make this practice or this game the reason that he doesn't go to the bar after it's finished.

There are important words and statements that the players could take with them into life, such as how the coach tells them to play with a chip on their shoulder, because adversity is a thing of which to take advantage, and that it's the little details of the game that make the difference. They're not going to make up the deficit in points with a single possession, so they just have to keep chipping away and chipping away, because, with that strategy, they will eventually.

The sport here is basketball, but does it really matter? Director Gavin O'Connor and screenwriter Brad Ingelsby don't seem to think so. Before the team plays their first game under their new leadership, the coach says that they're going win this one. Everyone moves off screen to start playing, and the camera turns slightly to look at the empty bleachers of a gymnasium (because nobody really wants to watch their team when it's certain they'll lose). The final score suddenly appears on the screen without a second of basketball being shown. The team lost considerably—by more than 30 points.

It's a strange but re-defining moment in a film that seems to be heading down the path of an overly familiar formula. Indeed, with those expectations in mind, it's strange how little basketball there actually is in this film. Games are reduced to a single play, a montage of the team repeatedly getting dunked on by their opponents, or just a series of scores. The film goes out of its way to assert and re-assert that the sport here isn't what's important.

What is important is the character of the coach. He's Jack Cunningham (Ben Affleck), who played for this Catholic school when he was a teenager and ended two seasons being named the league's most valuable player. Since then, a lot has happened to Jack, and little of it was good. He works construction now, is separated from his wife Angela (Janina Gavankar), and lives in a house that can only be described as habitable.

The early part of the film establishes one, defining characteristic about Jack: He's an alcoholic. After his work day is finished, he grabs a beer from a cooler in the back of his truck, pops it open, and pours it into a paper cup for the drive his regular bar. In the morning, he showers with a can of beer in the soap holder. Into his travel mug before starting work, he pours a bottle of gin, and the cycle continues.

O'Connor's camera just watches, and there's a sad helplessness to the routine, which isn't established immediately but spreads over the course of the first act. Jack isn't at the point where he realizes he has a problem, and the film, in taking its time to show just how dependent on alcohol the man is, reflects that state of mind.

The basketball plot arrives when his old school's principal Fr. Devine (John Aylward) asks him to replace the team's coach, who recently suffered a heart attack. Jack spends the night figuring out how deny the offer, as an entire refrigerator's worth of beer disappears. Instead, he takes the coaching gig, meets the perennially losing team and the assistant coach Dan (Al Madrigal), and slowly starts to take the job seriously.

To explain any further would be to undermine the story's revelations about Jack and his past, which O'Connor and Inglesby keep at bay from us, just as they did with the extent of the character's alcohol problem—and for the same reason (Basically, Jack avoids the subject, because acknowledging it would be much too much to bear). The sports side of the story progresses as we anticipate, with the team getting better, with the coach getting to know his quiet and shy star player Brandon (Brandon Wilson), and with Jack's leadership skills leading the team to a Big Game, where their season could end or continue to the playoffs, which the school hasn't been in since Jack played.

All of these usual beats, though, aren't portrayed with usual, familiar feeling of inspiration. The victories on the court don't matter as much as Jack's little victories—chipping away at his addiction, becoming less isolated from the rest of the world, finding something that makes his life more than figuring out ways to drink. The focus is almost exclusively on this character, and Affleck's subdued performance suggests a well of repressed pain, desperation, and grief bubbling just beneath the surface.

A less honest movie might find the answers to all of Jack's troubles in the sport—with the camaraderie of the team and the mostly inevitable result of that Big Game. The Way Back, though, denies this story such simplicity, because life's losses can't be forgotten, even with a series of hard-fought wins.

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