The Way Back (2020)

Released in the spring of 2020, just as theaters were closing their doors, The Way Back offers a familiar shape: a broken man, a whistle, a gymnasium, a shot at salvation. Jack Cunningham drinks and disappoints; the Catholic school of his youth hands him a basketball team of six varsity players and no playoff hopes. The premise is sturdy and old. What interests us is how little the film asks of its own moment. It is a drama of addiction and grief that never turns to address the audience, and in an era when films of this size arrive with a small printed list of correct positions tucked into the press kit, that restraint reads as either integrity or indifference.

The roster is multiethnic, drawn from the actual demographics of a Southern California parochial school, and the film lets that fact sit without commentary. Nobody delivers a speech about what the team represents. The same goes for the women in Jack's orbit. His estranged wife and his sister exist to worry and to insist, and are given no argument of their own. The film has no thesis about race, no economic grievance, no environmental conscience, no interest in the body or the brain's wiring. It is stubbornly a movie about one man and the dead son he cannot mention. When a film this plain is released, critics of a certain temperament go hunting for the message and come back empty-handed.

Affleck is the reason to watch. He plays the numbness and the self-disgust with a familiarity the tabloids had already documented for us, and he never begs. The basketball is competent. The redemption is partial, which is the correct ending for this kind of story. The film preaches almost never, and when it does, it is a coach telling teenagers to run the play. We have sat through two decades of movies that stop every twenty minutes to instruct us. This one lets a man shoot alone on an outdoor court as the credits prepare to roll. Modesty is its own kind of statement.