09 October 2020

Ben Affleck in The Way Back -- I Can Relate


We bring want we know, what we’ve experienced and what we believe to our movie-viewing experience. That’s one reason why two people who are very much alike might see the same film in different ways. This is particularly true if a movie resonates for a person because it reflects a particular experience of their own. I thus had a different experience watching The Way Back -- the recent release starring Ben Affleck and directed by Gavin O’Connor -- then did most critics.

Affleck stars as an alcoholic construction worker who is asked to coach the basketball team at the high school where he had earned glory 25 years prior.


My first thoughts as the movie began were: please don’t have all the usual sports movie cliches, especially the last-second win over a hated rival. But The Way Back did in fact have almost all that we’ve come to expect from sports movie: The coach (Affleck as Jack Cunningham) looking for a second chance in life who turns around a motley crew, the recalcitrant star player and the player with the bad attitude (a story line that was dropped just as it got started — no idea why). But in the end I didn’t mind so much because all those cliches were in service to a much deeper story. This was no more a basketball movie than Raging Bull is about boxing. (That said, the basketball scenes were excellent.)


Cunningham drank beer in a way I could totally relate to having myself once imbibed to wretched excess. Like me, Cunningham was drinking to dull a powerful emotional hurt. It’s a desperate kind of drinking, persistent, unreasonable and all-consuming. The alcoholic saturates pain with booze and marinates it and drowns it and then adds more because you can’t turn off the spigot once it’s open. Affleck, himself a recovering alcoholic, played the anguished, dead-eyed drunk to a tee. There are the drinker’s moments of joviality, jokes and laughs and kidding around that last until you get lost in the liquor and become a sodden blob for whom speech is a struggle and staying ambulatory a challenge. 


Of course the hangover cure is the proverbial hair of the dog which often turns into the whole damn coat. In lieu of a hangover you’re off on another binge.


Cunningham initially resists the offer to coach (another sports movie cliche) but can’t find a good enough reason not to do it. He takes over a team with one win against a bushel of losses. The school hasn’t made the playoffs since the coach himself was on the team.


Having coached soccer for a couple of dozen years I related to the experience of molding a team, instilling a philosophy and having a great bloody time doing it. (Side note: God, I miss coaching and guess I always will.)


The team struggles at first but the foul-mouthed Cunningham is a natural, if temperamental, coach. The team responds well to him. Of course there’s still the not-so- small matter of a drinking problem. Will it derail the coach’s efforts? Will he overcome the problem and lead the team to glory? No spoilers here. The ending is surprising and satisfying.


I looked at some of The Way Back’s reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. They were generally good but few were glowing. In reading some I noted that most reviewers clearly had never struggled with alcohol nor coached a youth team. My perspective on the film as an ex-drunk and former coach was thus quite different. 


I do not mean to suggest that critics should be required to have had the same life experiences as the characters in the films they review. Obviously you can do a spot on review of Saving Private Ryan without having stormed the beaches of Normandy and you can certainly critique Goodfellas without ever having been in the Mafia. You’re simply going to be more sympathetic to a film’s flaws if  the story is relatable to unique experiences of your own. For example, I love a deeply flawed film called The Strawberry Statement because, for all its faults, it captures some of what I experienced in the late Sixties.


Hours after watching The Way Back I missed it. I had enjoyed being part of Cunningham’s story, his ups, downs, his pain his joy. The film boasted a solid supporting cast (particularly Al Madrigal as the assistant coach) but it was Affleck’s film and whatever else one might think of him, he’s a good actor. He even sported the athlete/beer drinker body with its odd combination of fit and fat. I think it must have been healing for him to take on the role and it probably helped drive away some of the demons that still lurk for a sober alcoholic. I know it did me some good just to watch it. But damn, it sure made me miss coaching.


(The Way Back was released in March on the weekend before U.S. cities starting locking down. It did good business, but, of course, everything fell through the floor in the coming days.)

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