The Way Back

City Paper Grade: B

by Sam Adams

BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?: Playing a Soviet refugee in Peter Weir's The Way Back, Irish actor Colin Farrell struggles with his accent.

Peter Weir's first movie since 2003's Master and Commander is a most welcome return to form, his best since 1993's overlooked Fearless. The source is Slawomir Rawicz's 1956 memoir The Long Walk, which details his escape from a Siberian gulag and subsequent 4,000-mile trek to freedom. Rawicz's account has since been questioned, and may have been fabricated whole or in part, but the strengths of Weir's film have more to do with its awe-inspiring depiction of the ravages of nature than its historical accuracy.

Jim Sturgess plays Janusz, Rawicz's stand-in, a Pole whose tortured wife falsely accuses him of spying for foreign powers. From his first arrival in the prison camp, Weir amps the sound of howling winds and blots out the screen with frozen flurries. The camp's commander tells the assembled inmates that their true prison is not made of fences but the implacable wastes around them; there's a long way between simply escaping and living free. From scouring snows to the pitiless desert, they trek on, searching in vain for a country that has not been touched by the scourge of Stalin.

Until its heavy-handed ending, redeemed somewhat by Weir's lyrical touch, The Way Back serves as an understated allegory about the spread of Soviet totalitarianism, with prisoners from a wide swath of countries making up the ad hoc procession. It's unfortunate, though, that Weir chose to cast the film almost exclusively with actors from the British Isles: You might be able to accept Sturgess or Colin Farrell or Mark Strong as refugees from behind the Iron Curtain, but not all three at once. Only Saoirse Ronan, as an orphan they pick up along the way, really disappears into her role, and provides a much-needed respite from listening to the more experienced actors struggle with their accents. The Way Back has moments of great and terrifying beauty, but they most often occur when the actors are obscured by the elements.