And so we enter the new phase of the Ben Affleck meta movie. First there was the movie star flexes like Armageddon. Then came the Gigli era, commenting on Affleck’s hyper Hollywood relationships. Following that was the rebound era, culminating with his Best Picture Oscar for Argo. That tippy top was flexed with the Batman era, which went off the rails by Triple Frontier, where the star is talking about how lonely and old he’s gotten. The Way Back now sees Affleck recovering from a new rock bottom as a guise to tell the underdog sports movie around it.
Jack Cunningham (Affleck) was the star player of his Catholic High School basketball team. Something happened to him though, and a lifetime of setbacks left Jack aimless. He works construction, goes to the bar right after work, drinks himself into oblivion, and gets walked home so he can pass out on his couch, if he makes it there. His sister Beth (Michaela Watkins) and his ex wife Angela (Janina Gavankar) worry about him, but Jack’s hard exterior just pushes them away. Waiting to basically drink himself to death, Jack gets thrown a lifeline from his old school, whose coach left, leaving the team in need of a new coach.
The Way Back doesn’t try to reinvent the underdog story it’s bound by. It embraces it. Writer/director Gavin O’Connor’s raison d’etre though seems to be grounding the story in reality. As a result, the team Jack inherits knows how to play, and they lose games like 64-37, not 92-8. So when Jack comes in, he makes a few small changes here and there that add up to make the team slowly get better. 64-37 goes to 58-47 to 57-53 and finally to some wins for his guys. The boys also start maturing: they work harder, stop cursing for example as a team (a flaw in the film is we know very little bits of most of the players lives). The biggest change you see is in Brandon (Brandon Wilson), the team’s best player. Jack takes a personal stake in his success, teaching him how to become a leader. Sure it’s cliche, but when the shy kid blossoms into the guy who isn’t afraid to take the last shot of the game, it just works.
What becomes clear immediately though is that The Way Back isn’t about the basketball team: it’s about Jack. Sure most movies like this are about the coach, but that coach usually has his sh*t together. Not so here: Jack Cunningham is a broken man in The Way Back. What separates The Way Back from other movies of this sort is the third act. Usually, the success of the team is enough to smooth out any flaws the coach has, making him or her a god-like figure by the big game. Here, what’s broken inside Jack cannot be fixed that simply. There’s a reveal that explains away Jack’s behavior, making him a tragic, sympathetic figure to the audience. The team can only help Jack so much: HE has to want to get better and heal himself. I wish the movie, which was previously titled The Has Been, had been bolder and embraced how awful Jack is as a person, but I get it: sympathetic tragic figure is an easier sell than complicated cruel character.
I hope The Way Back has helped Ben Affleck deal with his personal demons and sees him back on the road to happiness. In the meantime, he can be proud of this film. It’s not life altering cinema, but it’s pretty inspiring, and can show the resiliency of the human spirit when it wants to. I’m glad you got the title changed Ben. I don’t think you’re a Has Been, but I do hope you find The Way Back.