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In purely cinematic terms, Peter Weir is by far the best thing ever to come out of Australia, an auteur of rare vision whose work spans from the strange and bizarrely terrifying Picnic on Hanging Rock to The Truman Show. Yet since 2003’s superb nautical epic Master and Commander, he has been strangely absent. A new release from him is therefore something to celebrate, as he returns to the silver screen, exchanging an epic sea voyage for an epic trek across many of the most desolate regions of the planet.
Starting in 1939, The Way Back tells the incredible and apparently true story of one of history’s most impressive prison breaks, following a group of political prisoners attempting to flee incarceration in Stalin’s Gulags by crossing over 4,000 kilometres of ice, snow and desert. This landscape is presented on an epic scale, with plenty of wide shots detailing the beautiful yet utterly inhospitable terrain serving very well to clearly present the outward struggles our intrepid escapees must face. Yet, here lies perhaps the film's biggest problem: despite dealing very well with the external problems the characters suffer and endure, it lacks depth when investigating their personal traumas and the development of its characters. At the same time, their accents damage the wonderfully believable environment created for them to live in. Throughout the film the viewer is constantly distracted by the character’s voices, as they speak for the most part in strangely accented and occasionally broken English. That becomes even more awkward with the film’s sudden jarring shifts between languages, most notably at the beginning when we suddenly hear the first lines of English after about 5 minutes of perfectly good subtitles.
However, these flaws are certainly not as terrible as they threaten to be. The film’s performances are, accents aside, generally very good, with Ed Harris’s American (a character who, surprisingly enough, is historically accurate) and Saoirsie Ronan standing out from the crowd. The casting works well for another crucial reason, since the film’s better-known actors are not necessarily the ones who make it all the way to India. As for Peter Weir, his direction does make the film work and connect well, creating an intriguing tale of hardship that manages to maintain a good pace without ever losing interest despite the almost complete lack of sudden action throughout its two and a quarter hours. It is brilliantly shot throughout with a camera that glides in a wonderfully unobtrusive and gentle manner.
The Way Back is overall a very good and very enjoyable film despite its problems, with my criticisms stemming from disappointment rather than dislike. Since Peter Weir has produced some truly phenomenal work over the years, justly earning a reputation as one of the world’s foremost filmmaking talents, this simply does not live up to the standards he has established in the past. At the end of the day, though, this is still an exceptional story and is arguably the best film currently on mainstream release.
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