The Way makes a film out of a pilgrimage, albeit not the religious kind. The pilgrimage in question happens to be a trek between France and Spain called El Camino De Santiago. People come from all over the world, each with their own personal reason, to tackle the pilgrimage. The film focuses on people battling their demons through the extended solitude afforded by the walk and through connecting with fellow pilgrims.
The film centres on Tom (Sheen), an elderly eye doctor who’d just lost his son to the pilgrimage and is now in France to retrieve the body. He decides to finish the pilgrimage in honour of his son who died on his first day of the trail. As he dwells on his grief and his tepid relationship with his son, he meets three other pilgrims with whom he ends up bonding; Joost (Van Wageningen), a kind Dutchman looking to lose weight, Sarah (Unger), a Canadian coming to terms with an abortion necessitated by an abusive husband and Jack (Nesbitt), an Irish writer with a crippling case of writer’s block.
The description makes it sound kind of sappy and it is, but it’s also sweet, genuine and quite touching. Tonally, the film skirts a very fine line between cheesy and touching, but none of the characters are overemotional. In fact, some of them - Tom in particular - are as stoic as they come, and this really does help the film from going off on the deep end. There’s also a lot of hostility and frostiness between the characters that only breaks down towards the end when they duke it out over what it takes to be a true pilgrim and whether privileged people can ever make the ranks.
Martin Sheen seems rather out of place in the film and in a way, it’s to the film’s benefit. His character is a suburban doctor forced to walk in his adventurer son’s boots for a change and his actions are a testament to his longing to connect with, and understand, his son. He does a fairly good job of making a very frosty, introverted character somewhat sympathetic. The rest of the characters don’t really get much of their own arcs as the story tends to focus on Tom, but they make a good impression with what they have. Yorick Van Wageningen in particular is great as the kind of person who gets trod on because of his unfailing amicability and who’s only recourse is to keep concealing his hurt inside him.
The film does occasionally stumble - scoring a scene to a Coldplay song comes to mind - and gets embarrassingly flaky dialogue-wise, but for the most part it’s a sweet little film that doesn’t get as depressing as its subject matter might imply.
