Ben Affleck is one of our most self-destructive performers. We like him most when he’s at his lowest point. A good Ben Affleck role tends to be a man on the verge of implosion, but I think these roles often ring just a bit hollow. He’s a charismatic, attractive guy. He’s a movie star! Unless the script finds some way to factor those features into his performance, there’s a disconnect. There’s a reason his best role in ages was as Gone Girl‘s Nick Dunne — it was playing to type. There, his charisma and handsomeness were used against him in ways that felt pretty sharp. The Way Back goes for something different. This is one of Affleck’s least flattering roles ever, trying to bury his movie star qualities. It’s also one of his best.
Jack Cunningham (Ben Affleck) is an alcoholic. He drinks on the job. He drinks while he drives. Hell, he drinks in the shower. Jack works his construction job all day, and ends most nights at a bar close to his rathole apartment. When he was young, he was a basketball prodigy, leading his high school to the championships. Now he’s put on weight, separated from his wife, and perpetually exhausted. But when the principal at his old Catholic school reaches out and asks for help coaching the barely-existent basketball team, he can’t quite bring himself to say no. So Jack comes home to find his former team in shambles. Despite a promising star in Marcus (Melvin Gregg), the team barely has enough players to get on the court. Can Jack stop his self-destructive streak long enough to help his former team — and himself?
“I spent a lot of time hurting myself.”
Addiction is hard to portray on screen, because in many ways it is fundamentally irrational. It’s also something you have to ram home in ways that might feel… let’s say ‘blunt’. The Way Back is very blunt. It’s Uncut Gems–level blunt in how thoroughly the character has fallen into his vice. I think he is drinking in literally every single scene for the first 5 minutes of the movie. I almost laughed, actually, as the situations got weirder and more ridiculous in such rapid succession. There’s definitely some alcoholism in my family tree, but I had never seen something like this. It felt like a joke.
But as the movie progressed, it won me over. Howie in Uncut Gems is a monster chasing a high to increasingly dangerous places. Jack is just trying to die. The movie is patient in talking about why that is, and it builds to a pair of brutally effective gut punch moments. None of it is surprising, per se. I don’t think viewers with much familiarity with the genre won’t get the broad nuances of Jack’s backstory pretty quickly. But The Way Back excels at the meat and potatoes storytelling needed to make those revelations land.
And, honestly, so does Ben Affleck. I mentioned above that this was Affleck’s most muted performance. I don’t just mean verbally. He put on a lot of weight for this role, and he looks unkempt and bleary-eyed in most scenes. His drunken transitions from pleading to lying to rage are genuinely difficult to watch. I always expect movies to soften the worst sides of alcoholics for their stars, but The Way Back doesn’t. While I might enjoy a bit more subtlety now and again, I confess, I enjoyed seeing Affleck is stretching himself as an actor. Suicidal alcoholic turned foul-mouthed inspirational high school basketball coach is a lot to throw at an actor, but Affleck’s burly stalking across the sidelines had a menace to it that really helped unite the two sides of his performance for me.
“Is the team any good?”
One of the great tricks the movie pulls is making you think you’re watching an underdog sports story. It’s Gavin O’Connor! He made Warrior. Shit, he made one of my favorite sports movies, Miracle. I get the impression that O’Connor could make one of those half asleep, because… well, he kind of does, here. The Way Back isn’t an underdog sports movie at its core — that is not what the emotional journey of the film is, in the end. But those parts of the movie are mostly really effective.
Mostly is an important word there, though. I had issues with the film and many of them stem from the sports aspect. We spend a lot of time on the basketball story, but we really only ever get to know one kid, Marcus. Some attempts are made to give another kid an emotional journey, but it felt like most of his scenes were left on the cutting room floor. It felt empty. The rest of the kids are one-note caricatures — the fat one (oh, good…), the playboy, the… football player? — and I’m not even sure what their names are. Wait, no, the fat kid is named ‘Chubs’, because fuck me, I guess.
But that’s a small issue, ultimately. One of the sharpest things about The Way Back is that the movie understands that, as important as these games are to the kids on the team, this is a movie about Jack. And Jack’s problems can’t be fixed by a basketball game. Often, the triumphant tone of sports movies comes from a conflation of the sport and the life. Winning in sports stands in for personal merit, for growth. What Gavin O’Connor and writer Brad Ingelsby ask here is: Should it be? Why do we conflate the two? And what does that mean for real healing?
“We can’t change the past, Jack.”
I’m mixed, ultimately, in where the movie comes down on those questions. I like what the movie is trying to do and say, its final quarter maybe the only mild surprise in the whole film, but the transition there is graceless. As with the Friday Night Lights film, this is a solid but shallow version of a gargantuan story that needs to be expanded upon to truly excel. The movie has so much ground to cover that it skims over a lot of crucial issues. Like: Was he drinking during the middle parts of the film? We don’t see it, but there’s nothing to suggest he isn’t, either. The tone of the film just changes completely for like 45 minutes. That’s not even getting into his students, particularly Marcus and his testy-but-confusing relationship with his father.
And yet, I did find it affecting. There are small grace notes that landed subtly but powerfully throughout the film. I’m so used to sports movies that wrap everything up in a bow, but The Way Back is smaller and more elliptical than that in a way I find enticing, despite its problems. One running thread about Jack’s foul mouth on the court would, in a cheaper version of this story, be fully resolved by the end. Perhaps he would see that he’s having some negative effect on his players. Perhaps he would even find his way back to God in a neat and tidy two hour arc. It’s easy to imagine that movie. But in The Way Back, change is incremental. It’s uncertain. And most importantly, it’s hard.
Look, I’m a cynical person by nature. I did not go into The Way Back particularly excited for it, and I didn’t come out raving. There are a lot of familiar beats here. But there’s also a power to its emotions that has stuck with me in the days since I saw it. I went in expecting something very simple, and that movie is present. It’s just not the only movie on the screen at the time. At its heart, The Way Back never forgets that it is a movie about grief, not about basketball, not about inspiration, and it takes that grief seriously in a way I didn’t expect. This isn’t the best movie Ben Affleck’s been in, but it’s the best Ben Affleck’s ever been. And if you want to see a surprisingly thoughtful character piece from a major studio, you could do much, much worse.
The Way Back is out now in theaters everywhere. Directed by Gavin O’Connor and written by O’Connor and Brad Ingelsby, The Way Back stars Ben Affleck, Al Madrigal, and Melvin Gregg.