“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.
Butler's Cinema Scene 