“THE WAY” My rating: B (Opening wide Oct. 7)
115 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13
Emilio Estevez’s “The Way” is old fashioned filmmaking.
By which I mean that it takes its time, lets its story and its characters breathe, and slowly gets under your skin until it becomes a part of you.
It’s not perfect, but this variation on the road movie — or “Canterbury Tales,” if you’re a classicist — is terrifically satisfying.
Widower and LA area opthamologist Tom Avery (Martin Sheen) is enjoying a game of golf when the cell phone call comes through. His only child, his son Daniel, has died while traveling in France.
Tom has no choice but to catch a flight to Paris. A train trip brings him to a small town in the Pyrennes where a police officer (French film stalwart Tcheky Karyo) informs him that Daniel died in a mountain storm while attempting to walk the Camino de Santiago, or Way of St. James, a 500-mile pilgrimage from Southern France into Spain and on to a cathedral in the city of Galacia where the bones of St. James reportedly rest.
A fairly solitary man in the best of times, Tom must bear the burden not only of Daniel’s death of but their final encounter, in which Tom berated his son for living the life of a wandering hippie at age 38. Looking for a way to connect with his estranged son, Daniel decides to walk the Camino himself, spreading Daniel’s ashes along the way.
So “The Way” is basically a road movie, albeit a slow road movie (everybody’s walking, right?).
Yorick van Wageningen, Deborah Kara Unger, James Nesbitt and Martin Sheen along The Way
Without really wanting it to happen, Tom attracts a handful of fellow pilgrims, none of whom are particulary religious.
The fat Dutchman Joost (Yorick van Wageningen) hopes to lose weight on the long hike, although his tremendous appetite suggests he’ll be lucky to break even.
The sardonic, angry Sarah (Deborah Kara Unger, radiating bruised beauty) wants to forget a traumatic marriage.
The Irish writer Jack (James Nesbitt) is supposed to be doing a guide book about The Way, but he’s dealing with a bad case of writer’s block.
As the weeks pass (it takes a couple of months to do The Way on foot) Tom goes from resenting these fellow travelers to cherishing their companionship.
There are big meals, stays in inns and snore-filled hostels, minor adventures (Tom’s backpack is dropped into a mountain stream and later stolen by a gypsy boy) and embarrassing moments (a drunken Tom spends a night in a Spanish police station) and more gorgeous scenery than one film deserves.
Periodically Tom gets flashes of his late son (played by his real-life son, the writer/director of this movie).
Estevez (his last directing effort was “Bobby,” about the day Robert Kennedy was shot) is so good at latching onto the unhurried rhythms of the pilgrimage that when “The Way” does aim for dramatic fireworks it sometimes feels a tad forced.
But there’s no complaining about the performances, especially Sheen’s, which goes from grief to glum hilarity and on to something resembling transcendence.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
This, sadly, is no Canterbury Tales, rather we find in this sad sack collection of characters a poor man’s Wizard of Oz. There is the Cowardly Lion, worrying about his weight & wife….the Scarecrow, angular and gangly, bounding about in his field of hay, looking for a Brain (or the ability to write), Dorothy, puffing madly about the countryside, wearing not Ruby Slippers but a pair of jeans so tight that surgery would be required after a single day of hiking. And most importantly, in this version, we find the Tin Man (with his tin box) who seems (according to his companions) a “little stiff”, looking for his Heart (which is, of course, his lost son and his lost self).
The dialogue, when it tries the hardest, is at its worst. It strives for “deep” but flails madly in the shallows — telling us in scene after scene, “pay attention here comes another heavy line” (which falls, predictably enough, with a hollow clang). Sheen and his surrounding cast do an admirable job with very thin material and I was glad enough to accompany them on their journey, in the beginning. Unfortunately, by the end, past the “Emerald City” (long past the Doorman peering through his spyhole, asking “Who’s There), we discover they really didn’t go anywhere or learn anything (except, perhaps, that walking along the coast of Spain, drinking gallons of wine, beats the hell out of Opthamology).