The Australian director, Peter Weir, has not made a movie since The Way Back released in 2010. I recall that the film was released to lukewarm reviews and failed to make any money. It's a handsome production with strong performances but the picture is harrowing and unpleasant to watch. Furthermore, there's a weird aspect to the script -- the movie seems to be a paean to Polish nationalism with a curious reactionary aspect. Even the villains in the picture go out of their way to praise Polish patriots. I assume this strange feature originates in the book on which the picture is based Slawomir Rawicz' The Long Walk (1956). Peter Weir has been an acclaimed filmmaker -- he made The Year of Living Dangerously (with a young Mel Gibson), Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli, Witness (with Harrison Ford), The Truman Show, and a film version of Master and Commander (based on the Patrick O'Brien historical novel); his pictures have been intelligent fusions of thought-provoking and challenging narratives with star power and popular appeal. Weir's instincts seem to have deserted him in The Way Back -- there's something impalpably wrong with the movie; it may be that the subject matter is too grim to be entertaining.
During World War Two, a resistance fighter for the Polish underground is captured by Stalin's thugs. The man is asked to sign a confession but refuses. Then, the commissar confronts our protagonist with his wife who has been tortured into informing on him. The resistance fighter, Janusz, is sent to a labor camp in Siberia, a hundred or so miles north of Lake Baikal. The labor camp is a hellhole in which the prisoners are beaten, forced to work in subzero temperatures cutting down trees and breaking rocks, and systematically starved. The Gulag is run from the inside by a group of malign career criminals led by Valka (Colin Ferrell) who plays a homicidal gangster -- he knifes a man to death in order to take his sweater which he, then, gambles away. The work detail gets caught in a blizzard and a number of the weakened prisoners freeze to death. Janusz, who is skilled in outdoor survival, saves the company by retreating into a forest (notwithstanding threats by the panicked guards to shoot him) and constructing a wind break. In retaliation for his resourcefulness, he and his comrades are sent to a mine, visualized as a chaos of explosions, falling rock, and steamy shadowy darkness. In the mine, Janusz hallucinates the door to a dacha with flowers on the sill that he staggers toward but can't reach. The situation becomes increasingly dire and, so, Janusz with six other inmates plot their escape and flee from the camp in the snowy darkness -- the blizzard will cover their tracks. After a desperate chase -- they are pursued by dogs -- the convicts elude the guards but, then, are trapped in the Siberian wilderness. (Like Trump's "Alligator Alcatraz", geography not walls and guards are the main security measures confining the prisoners to the Gulag camp.) One of the men has night blindness, wanders off while gathering firewood, and freezes to death. The men become increasingly weak -- we see them eating bugs and contemplating cannibalism -- but, at last, reach Lake Baikal where there are remote and scattered villages from which they can steal food. Upon reaching the border with Mongolia, the fierce convict, Valka, refuses to leave Mother Russia -- he is a Russian patriot and, in fact, an admirer of Lenin and Stalin. The escapees have picked up a wan, wraith-like Polish girl wandering in the woods near the great lake -- it's never entirely clear why she is alone in the wilderness and, as it happens, she is also a liar so her explanations must be discounted. Because Mongolia is also a Communist country (and this film is avowedly anti-Communist), the characters continue to avoid villages and roads, walking cross country until they reach the Gobi desert. They, then, stagger across the desert for hundreds of miles gradually perishing from thirst and inanition. The Polish girl dies and others perish as well. Only four survivors reach Tibet where they are met by some monks who assist them, demanding that they wait for Spring to limp over the Himalayas. But our heroes are anxious to get back and, so, they hike across the Himalayas in mid-winter, ending up in the terraces where tea is grown in Bhutan. This is effectively the end of the trek and the film doesn't really explain what happens next. There's a montage involving the vexed history of countries behind the Iron Curtain progressing from the end of the Second World War through the Fall of Communism. In the final scene, Vulka, who is now, an old man sees the dacha that he has envisioned for the last forty years, finds a key under a peculiar honeycomb-shaped rock and, then, enters the cottage where he is reunited with his aged wife.
All of this is filmed with great conviction. The protagonists starve, are frozen half to death, fall into water and run across fracturing ice; they are swarmed by mosquitos until their eyes are swollen shut and, then, crawl across an infinity of bright, hideous desert -- they drink mud and eat insects and fight with wolves for fragments of a rotting bloody carcass. Their feet are scabbed, swollen, blistered and the sun burns their faces. It's mostly horrific and utterly without drama -- it's almost impossible to make a movie about a hike of this sort: what are you going to show? people walking doggedly through all sorts of landscapes -- they just walk and walk and walk, quarreling sometimes, and, then, collapsing and dying. Movies about people perishing of thirst in the desert don't have much appeal. It's the same problem with the Titanic -- do I really want to see a bunch of people drowning in frigid water? Parts of the movie are gripping and the landscapes are spectacular, huge vistas with tiny figures limping over the peaks or glaciers or sand dunes. But the movie seems somewhat pointless. Ed Harris plays an American prisoner haunted by grief; he is anguished over bringing his family to Russia where he was employed as some kind of engineer and, therefore, blames himself for his son being shot by the Communists. The film's entire orientation is aggressively pro-Polish and anti-Communist. A good comparison to this film is Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn about American POWs escaping through the wilderness from a hellish prison camp in the jungle -- somehow, Herzog makes a picture that is febrile, a visionary nightmare from which the viewer feels distanced due to the movie's beauty and feverish alienating intensity -- he aestheticizes starvation and misery. Weir, who was also one of cinema's notable visionaries (I am thinking of The Last Wave and Picnic at Hanging Rock) can't quite figure out how to make walking interesting -- it's like The Lord of the Rings without the monster spiders, horror-horsemen, and orcs. I wanted to like this picture because it's an honorable effort, but I can't recommend it.
(The book on which the movie is based has recently been revealed to be a hoax. There's no evidence that the protagonist and author actually completed the titular Long Walk and there are, indeed, certain implausibilities in the story. Knowledge that this grim trek never really happened is both reassuring but fatal to the movie, which seems completely pointless in the absence of a documentary basis in fact)_
