For Gavin O'Connor's latest film, The Way Back, modesty is the name of the game.

The film follows Jack Cunningham (Ben Affleck), a former high school basketball phenom, now alcoholic construction worker, who is offered a coaching position at his old stomping grounds. Many of the formal choices seem to reflect the modest scope of the plot. Conversations between characters are shot tightly and handheld, whether they’re set in open-air restaurants or the intimate confines of a car. Regardless of the time of day in any given scene, there is an intentional dullness to the coloring of them, but not oppressively so.

While Affleck’s seemingly disinterested performance may be off-putting to some, I found his sleepy demeanor to realistically tap into a malaise familiar to those affected by substance abuse. There is an intentionality to the way he saunters around his dingy home and when he mournfully chugs beer at a local dive bar. He plays a man who has been going through the motions. The way in which Jack denies responsibility for his actions, projects blame on others, and habitually lies about his consumption, tragically rings true of real addicts. Affleck has never looked so defeated on camera, but he also has never seemed so sincere either.

While Jack’s addiction is foregrounded as the primary conflict of The Way Back, by the end of the film it becomes increasingly clear that its primary thematic focus is in the importance of confronting past trauma and learning to move past it. Throughout the film, Jack does everything in his power to avoid engaging with his past. Nearly every action he makes — from his initial hesitation in taking the coaching job to ignoring calls from his old friends, seem to indicate an unhealthy willingness to disassociate from the past. By engaging with the sport he once loved, reconnecting with his ex-wife and eventually entering therapy, the film posits that while there is no literal “way back” to return to how things once were, accepting trauma is a vital part of growing past it.

While The Way Back generally works as a portrait of trauma and addiction, there is a palpable unevenness to it that stems from a lack of structural focus. While the shaky performances of the high-school players are mostly forgivable, the frequent appearance of clunkily-shot basketball sequences that muddle up the middle act of the film are inexcusable. These action scenes were so sloppily done that I wish the film took High Flying Bird’s approach of simply not showing them at all. The film spends a significant amount of time following some of the key players on the team, but never fully explores their characters in a meaningful manner. Their arcs are introduced and completed with a wave of the hand, serving as nothing more than a distraction to Jack’s story. By the end of the second act, the film’s audience has been subjected to a number of frequently parodied sports-cliches; including the “big game” against the rival team and a “nobody believes in us” speech, all of which are presented without a hint of irony and aren’t particularly exciting. The filmmakers obviously weren’t as interested in the sports part of this sports-drama, which is fine, but why did they spend so much of the film’s relatively short runtime on it?

Despite the film’s flaws, I am glad The Way Back exists. Its position as a mid-budget Hollywood film serves as a prime example of a type of filmmaking that has become increasingly rare in a marketplace that usually only allows for franchise blockbusters and smaller, lower-budget films. Even if I find fault in its uneven structure and its priority setting, The Way Back is still a competent film that executes its dramatic qualities well enough to give me hope that more movies of a similar scope can follow suit or even surpass it. It is a film worth rooting for.

Written by Kyle Khang - March 12th, 2020