Yesterday, I watched The Way Back, a 2010 movie directed by Peter Weir.
It tells the story of a group of inmates escaping a Gulag camp in Siberia in 1940. In one of the first scenes, the main character, Janusz, falsely accused of being a spy, arrives at the camp with a group of other new arrivals. In a “welcome” speech, the camp commander reminds the new inmates that it is not the barbed wire and the guards imprisoning them, but Siberia itself: the camp is surrounded by millions of km² of harsh nature.
When Janusz and his friends, after an act of insubordination, are transferred from felling trees in the forest to work in a mine, they decide the time has come to escape. Then, they make an epic trek to freedom.
It is a strange film. It seems the director set out not to make the film one would expect: the one with the dramatic escape scene, with tense encounters with locals and dangerous animals, with dramatic fissures appearing in the community of escapees, the one with tear-jerking deathbed scenes. The director didn’t want to make that film. But what film díd he want to make, one wonders.
Although they make an enormous journey, from deep Siberia to Mongolia through the Gobi desert over the Himalayas, nothing much is happening. Crossing the Himalayas from China to India amounts to a scene on a mountaintop with a string of those colorful Tibetan prayer flags and a Tibetan pointing out the way to Lhasa.
The former ZEKs walk through harsh and beautiful landscapes. Still, somehow, the director couldn’t make me feel the heroic effort or the gigantic distances, maybe because there are not many aerial shots (no drones back then) in the film to show the tiny figures in an enormous expanse of desert, tundra, or forest. Nor did I experience the ex-inmates hardships on the visceral level.
The differences are stark when I compare this movie to another one about a heroic journey back to civilization. While watching The Revenant, I experienced on a visceral level the indifference of nature, the arctic cold, and the protagonist's loneliness. I was amazed by his ingenuity and resourcefulness. Would you have thought of disemboweling a freshly killed horse and enveloping yourself in its remaining flesh to survive a subarctic night? Not me, either. Compared to Leonardo di Caprio’s fight with a Grizzly, the quarrel between the inmates and a group of wolves over a carcass is decidedly undramatic.
There are few dramatic moments in this movie anyway. The escape from the camp is glossed over, and the chase afterward is over before you know it: no near escapes from the mouths of bloodthirsty dogs in this movie. Even potentially dramatic moments (quite a few people die ) didn’t touch me.
There is not a lot of dramatic development in the group or within the characters. A beautiful Polish girl arrives, and I imagined this would lead to drama: jealousy, love triangles, one guy trying to rape her under the stars, and another one saving her, whatever, but none of that.
The scenes in the camp are fun to watch, particularly the interaction between the political prisoners and the common criminals.
The group of characters is not set up properly. For example, half an hour into the escape, I thought:” Who is this guy? Did I see him before? Did he escape as well?” (while only seven inmates escaped).
The end is over-the-top kitschy.
Still, I was not tempted to push stop on the DVD player. That means something because I stop watching at least half of the movies within 10 minutes.
This had a lot to do with the actors: Colin Farell, Ed Harris, and Saoirse Ronan are all charismatic and fun to watch, even with their faces savaged by the harsh weather conditions of Siberia and the Gobi Desert (or rather the film’s makeup artists who received an Oscar nomination for their efforts).