Dabbler Review: The Way Back

There are plenty of English language films about the Holocaust, but very few about the Soviet Gulag.  It might be the obvious angle, but it’s difficult to consider Peter Weir’s new film, The Way Back, in any other light.  The wastes of Siberia now have their very own Hollywood blockbuster.

The movie is an old-fashioned epic, both in look and scale.  It was ’inspired’ by, rather than based upon, a story which the director believes to be true.  A book called The Long Walk, published in 1956, purports to describe a Polish prisoner’s epic 4,000 mile trek from a camp near Irkutsk, through the Gobi Desert and the Himalaya, culminating in India.

The text was comprehensively demolished by the BBC in 2006, after it revealed that the Pole was in fact simply released by the Soviet authorities.  The book most likely comprised either pure invention or an amalgamation of prisoners’ tall tales.   The idea that a group of detainees actually did escape from the Gulag and walk to India is completely unproven.

The premise of The Way Back was therefore already in doubt, even before it was made.  The film depicts four prisoners surviving an overland odyssey to India, after they make a break from their camp in Siberia.

They travel through a landscape over which the camera sweeps majestically.  It makes for some arresting visuals, but it isn‘t Siberia.  The Russian wilderness was recreated in Bulgaria.  Dunes in Morocco stood in for the Gobi desert.

If the film has problems, though, they don’t lie with the inauthentic settings or with the cast.  The performances are good.  Jim Sturgess plays Janusz, effectively the group’s leader, quite convincingly.  He has been imprisoned on the strength of testimony from his wife, whom he is determined to forgive in person.   Colin Farrell also depicts a career criminal or ’blatnoi’ rather well.

The difficulty is that the prisoners, once they leave the Gulag, proceed almost painlessly to India.  Certainly there are hairy moments, hunger and thirst, even a death or two along the way, but their tribulations and behaviour don’t really ring true.

These are desperate men – fresh from a brutal and dehumanising environment.  That much we know from the film’s excellent opening scenes, which take place within the camp itself.

The thing is, once they escape, they behave remarkably civilly.  They even take under their wing a fugitive teenage girl called Irina (played by flavour of the month – Saoirse Ronan).

After a little debate, she’s soon tagging along with the group, well-liked and completely unmolested.  Even Farrell‘s character, who in the camp stabs and robs at will, is perfectly respectful.  Indeed ’Valka’ becomes ever more the likeable rogue, and ever less a violent thug, as the film progresses.

In the end he refuses to cross the border into Mongolia, such is his love for Mother Russia.  Meanwhile his colleagues are burying each other with due deference, piggy-backing the laggards, acting as surrogate fathers for Saoirise and generally being thoroughly decent chaps.

It all adds up to a rather sanitised take on ‘gruelling‘.  The walking scenes lack the fine detail which makes the depiction of the prison convincing.  Understandable enough when you consider that the walk probably didn’t take place, while there are plenty of first hand accounts of the camps upon which to draw.

The first Hollywood blockbuster about the Gulag is for the most part a romantic epic, rather than a gritty slice of realism, but don‘t let that put you off.  It’s still entertaining.  Just don’t go expecting the definitive film on survival in the Siberian wilderness.

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About Author Profile: Owen Polley

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7 thoughts on “Dabbler Review: The Way Back

  1. Worm
    February 9, 2011 at 13:14

    cool review Owen, to be honest I don’t think my local cinema would even show a film like this. Apparently the good people of my town can only cope with big flashy blockbusters and high school dancing things

  2. andrewnixon@blueyonder.co.uk'
    February 9, 2011 at 13:16

    I suppose this one of those ones where if it isn’t strictly true then it tells bits of stories which are. But playing around with the truth isn’t ideal if you’re trying to expose the great lies of communism.

    Peter Weir has directed two of my favourite movies – ‘Master and Commander’ (which is about masculinity) and ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ (about femininity).

  3. johngjobling@googlemail.com'
    malty
    February 9, 2011 at 13:54

    That will be a must see, Siberian sojourning is an endlessly fascinating subject, Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich being the instigator. An aspect of Russian life that took a definite turn for the worse under Uncle Joe’s tutelage, whilst he resided there it sounded idyllic, burdz, booze, hunting, plotting.
    Agree with you Brit, Hanging Rock was a class act.

  4. john.hh43@googlemail.com'
    john halliwell
    February 9, 2011 at 17:24

    The Long Walk gripped me from first to last when I read it in the sixties. I finished it in a couple of sittings as my mother always pushed me to return library books asap (a fine was unacceptable). I remember freezing in Siberia, almost passing out in the heat of the Gobi, mourning the loss of those who wouldn’t make it, gasping for air in the Himalayas, and feeling ecstatic at entering India.

    I believed every word on every sodding page, and then, years later, discovered the awful truth that it was probably a complete fiction. Bloody hell ! I might have watched this film, but the massive doubts about the veracity of the tale, and Owen’s review of Weir’s account of desperate men retaining or discovering civilised behaviour under the most trying of circumstances, stop me. I’ll live with the memory of a dog-eared book, with a ripped orange dust jacket, and a library stamp that showed I was a rare borrower.

  5. bugbrit@live.com'
    Banished To A Pompous Land
    February 9, 2011 at 20:24

    I’d always thought of Weir as a kind of Aussie Nicolas Roeg though he hasnt quite crashed and burned the way Roeg did.

    Hanging Rock’s a gem but go dig out The Last Wave that ones a wonder even with Richard Chamberlain starring.

  6. Gaw
    February 9, 2011 at 22:05

    Fake fact is unappealing in a way that fiction isn’t. No idea why.

  7. owen.polley@talk21.com'
    February 10, 2011 at 11:57

    A very pertinent observation Gaw. Although it’s interesting that, in the publishing world at least, authors have felt driven to package their work as fact rather than fiction in order to get it published.

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