The Way (2010)
Country: US/SP
Technical: col 123m
Director: Emilio Estevez
Cast: Martin Sheen, Emilio Estevez, Deborah Kara Unger, Yorick van Wageningen, James Nesbitt, Tchéky Karyo
Synopsis:
An ophthalmologist who loses his son on the Camino de Santiago de Compostella travels to Europe to identify and repatriate the body, but decides instead to complete the journey and scatter the ashes along the way.
Review:
Not a family drama, though the journey, and the film, is plagued by the ghost of Estevez; not a travelogue, in spite of many shots and montages through delightful scenery and remote villages. Estevez's film is caught in an identity crisis and falls back on its characterisations of the people Tom meets on the way, whom he for the most part shuts out and who really have very little to do with his story of acceptance and personal growth: the pilgrim experience, as the film is at pains to point out, is an innately personal one. For all that, what remains is an at times affecting story with a strong central performance holding it together. It's just a shame that the cultural exchange was not more with the language and history passed through, than with those of the wayfarers. For the most part we have recourse to cliché (el Ramón, the mad rustic recluse; the wine, there to get pissed on; the reference to tapas, there to make the American look stupid), with an encounter with a thieving boy's gypsy father that seems out of a different century.
Country: US/SP
Technical: col 123m
Director: Emilio Estevez
Cast: Martin Sheen, Emilio Estevez, Deborah Kara Unger, Yorick van Wageningen, James Nesbitt, Tchéky Karyo
Synopsis:
An ophthalmologist who loses his son on the Camino de Santiago de Compostella travels to Europe to identify and repatriate the body, but decides instead to complete the journey and scatter the ashes along the way.
Review:
Not a family drama, though the journey, and the film, is plagued by the ghost of Estevez; not a travelogue, in spite of many shots and montages through delightful scenery and remote villages. Estevez's film is caught in an identity crisis and falls back on its characterisations of the people Tom meets on the way, whom he for the most part shuts out and who really have very little to do with his story of acceptance and personal growth: the pilgrim experience, as the film is at pains to point out, is an innately personal one. For all that, what remains is an at times affecting story with a strong central performance holding it together. It's just a shame that the cultural exchange was not more with the language and history passed through, than with those of the wayfarers. For the most part we have recourse to cliché (el Ramón, the mad rustic recluse; the wine, there to get pissed on; the reference to tapas, there to make the American look stupid), with an encounter with a thieving boy's gypsy father that seems out of a different century.
Country: US/SP
Technical: col 123m
Director: Emilio Estevez
Cast: Martin Sheen, Emilio Estevez, Deborah Kara Unger, Yorick van Wageningen, James Nesbitt, Tchéky Karyo
Synopsis:
An ophthalmologist who loses his son on the Camino de Santiago de Compostella travels to Europe to identify and repatriate the body, but decides instead to complete the journey and scatter the ashes along the way.
Review:
Not a family drama, though the journey, and the film, is plagued by the ghost of Estevez; not a travelogue, in spite of many shots and montages through delightful scenery and remote villages. Estevez's film is caught in an identity crisis and falls back on its characterisations of the people Tom meets on the way, whom he for the most part shuts out and who really have very little to do with his story of acceptance and personal growth: the pilgrim experience, as the film is at pains to point out, is an innately personal one. For all that, what remains is an at times affecting story with a strong central performance holding it together. It's just a shame that the cultural exchange was not more with the language and history passed through, than with those of the wayfarers. For the most part we have recourse to cliché (el Ramón, the mad rustic recluse; the wine, there to get pissed on; the reference to tapas, there to make the American look stupid), with an encounter with a thieving boy's gypsy father that seems out of a different century.