Essentially a Catholic morality tale disguised as a heartwarming adventure story, Emilio Estevez’s The Way, starring his father Martin Sheen, is in many ways the thematic inverse of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which featured Sheen’s (arguably) most famous role. While the Vietnam War epic grows wilder and madder as Sheen’s Capt. Willard journeys deeper into the heart of human darkness, this picture becomes gradually lighter and happier as its main character traverses El Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage path in northwestern Spain (a scene in this film even reminded me of the unfortunate plantation sequence from the director’s cut of Coppola’s work, though without the tiresome colonialism discussion and subsequent superfluous sex scene). But while this narrative parallel tenuously links the two films together, they could not be more disparate in nearly every other filmic category, especially the one that matters most – overall quality.
Estevez’s screenplay, partly based on his own story (inspired by a pilgrimage that Sheen and Estevez’s son Taylor took together) and partly drawn from stories in Jack Hitt’s Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim’s Route into Spain (a travel book about the pilgrimage), is an unfortunate embodiment of cloying Hollywood sentimentality. It concerns Californian Tom Avery (Sheen), a golf-playing ophthalmologist summoned to France to collect the body of his globe-trotting son Daniel (Estevez himself), who attempted the pilgrimage and died on the first day – a victim of bad weather. Attempting to deal with his grief, and unsure what to do with Daniel’s remains or possessions (his wife having also passed away), Tom resolves to walk the path himself, utilizing Daniel’s backpack and carrying his ashes. And so begins a typical quest storyline, in which the main character undergoes a vast journey of some kind in order to accomplish some narrative-based goal and thus learn something about oneself. Tom’s goal is more abstract, but his character evolution is no less predictable – this is Hollywood, after all.
Of course, Tom’s journey is beset by various obstacles along the way; since this is a family story, though, the obstacles are few and far between. Indeed, they come off as mere annoyances more than anything: noisy and uncomfortable hostel beds, loudmouthed and opinionated foreigners, and the always-troubling language barrier (though everyone still speaks English, of course!). Tom is also accompanied by a myriad band of fellow travelers – Dutchman Joost (Yorick von Wageningen), Canadian Sarah (Deborah Kara Unger), and Irish writer Jack (James Nesbitt) – each of whom has particular and well-trod reasons for making the pilgrimage: Joost wants to lose weight, Sarah wants to quit smoking, and Jack wants to write a book (it is uncertain whether he is based on Hitt, but since the actual writer is from South Carolina, it seems unlikely). These obviously selfish motives seem to contrast with Tom’s more selfless and guilt-ridden purpose (it’s clearly articulated that he wishes to repent for not accepting his son’s chosen life), but only in a very shallow way. At his heart, Tom is just as self-centred as the others (wishing to absolve himself and relieve his grief), but because his motivations are overtly Catholic, the film allows it. Perhaps some might see it differently; I didn’t buy it.
Estevez’s aesthetic is plain and ultimately pointless. Though there is obvious natural beauty depicted along the way, Estevez fails to really capture the awe-inspiring vistas and even manmade architecture that makes the pilgrimage so memorable. Even though the camera is suitably kinetic at times (circling the characters nauseatingly during their first meeting with Jack), there’s no real purpose or intent to Estevez’s method, as he makes stylistic choices apparently on a whim. Clearly Estevez is not much of a director (I haven’t seen Bobby or anything else he’s made, but judging by this, I don’t think I will), and the film only barely coasts by due to Sheen’s game (if overwrought) performance, van Wageningen and Nesbitt’s humourous ones, and a decent sense of camaraderie amongst the characters. It’s not a movie you watch for its artistic value, clearly.
In the end, The Way rings almost totally false. Presenting an utterly safe and whitewashed vision of Europe (an encounter with gypsies turns hilariously righteous and contradicts every experience I had on my own European trip), with culturally stereotyped figures (Jack the Irishman has a drinking problem and wants to be James Joyce; Joost the Dutchman does a lot of drugs) and an almost complete absence of the prevailing anti-American viewpoints throughout the world (“An American without an opinion,” Joost jokes about Tom at one point, but it’s one of the few mentions), it is an enjoyable, amusing, and ultimately boring work. Infallibly sincere, without a hint of irony (much like its lead character), and featuring some heavy-handed Catholic sermonizing (Sarah, also running away from a regrettable abortion, stands in as the film’s pro-life figure), it is seemingly a film made primarily for the elderly, religious, and/or easily-pleased audiences; for me, a young secular cynic, it just didn’t work.
