‘The Way Back’ Review – It’s the Best Movie of 2020 but Was Forgotten About Because of Pandemic

Last November, I wrote about The Way Back just after the trailer had been released. I was stoked to see this movie for several reasons, the main being that Ben Affleck would be portraying a character he could personally relate to – a recovering alcoholic. Sadly, the coronavirus pandemic happened and movie theaters all across the country were forced to close; not ideal for a March 6th premiere. However, just because it lost money at the box office and could be considered a commercial failure, The Way Back is a damn good movie.

In my trailer review, I said I thought the movie would be “Coach Carter meets Crazy Heart“. I was pretty spot on with that comparison, but to my surprise, it is much more about Jack Cunningham’s (Ben Affleck) internal struggle with alcoholism than it is about basketball. In fact, I don’t even think you could call this a “basketball movie” in the purest sense if the points of comparison are movies like Coach Carter, Above the Rim, and/or White Men Can’t Jump. In those movies, basketball is the central theme around which there would be no story if you removed it (just look at the titles). It’s like calling Straight Outta Compton a musical. While there are certainly musical elements in Straight Outta Compton, it’s safe to say that it’s no La La Land. In The Way Back, we don’t even see a basketball until around fifteen minutes into the film. Basketball serves more as a crutch for Cunningham, who has spent the last few years as a raging alcoholic following the death of his 9-year-old son. Don’t get me wrong, coaching the basketball team was instrumental in his road to recovery, but I always felt that it was playing second fiddle to the other issues at hand.

Regardless, Affleck was fantastic in this role, and it’s a shame this movie was essentially forgotten about because of when it was released. I’d even go so far as to say that this was one of the best roles of his career. I have to believe that his personal afflictions with alcohol led to him delivering such a powerful performance because he identified with the character like not many other actors could.

As great as Affleck was in this role, the writers deserve a ton of credit for the layout of this movie. Jack Cunningham’s character was like an onion that kept getting peeled back one layer at a time. At first, we have no idea why he’s a drunk. All I know is that if you have to bring a cooler full of beer to work every day, you’ve been through some shit. First layer – we find out that he’s been separated from his wife for a while, but they are not divorced and things seem pretty amicable between the two of them. Sure, that’s a shitty situation, but not drinking-yourself-under-the-table-every-night kind of shitty. There’s gotta be more to his story. Second layer – his son died of cancer at the age of 9. Okay, yup, makes sense. There isn’t anything worse in this world for a parent than losing a child, but watching your young son slowly die via brain tumors would be enough to drive any sane person off the edge, nonetheless someone with his background. Third layer – he had a shitty father. One night on their drive home, Brandon (Brandon Wilson) asks Coach why he turned down a full ride to Kansas out of high school. Cunningham goes on to tell us that his father pretty much only liked him because he was good at basketball, so to really stick it to his old man, he just quit. As if foregoing a college scholarship and a potential NBA career wasn’t enough, he wound up getting into drugs, among other substances as well to really piss off his dad. That right there, ladies and gents, is the trifecta of future substance abuse. No way someone goes through all that and comes out a normal person on the other side…you’ve got to be one mentally tough son of a bitch.

Another aspect of the movie that didn’t go unnoticed for a stickler like me was that it actually looked like the actors had played basketball before. One of my biggest pet peeves is when movies cast someone who has clearly never played sports in their life. It takes away from the ambiance of a scene when someone has terrible shooting or throwing mechanics, so the fact that the basketball scenes in this movie were believable was huge. And since I’m talking about believable roles, I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t remind you about Ben Affleck’s huge back tattoo – one of many questionable choices he’s made in his personal life. Love your movies though, Ben!