Martin Sheen in 'The Way' - Photo courtesy Arc Entertainment
Is it possible to make a
movie about religious faith — why it works for some people, why it
doesn’t for others — that explicates the matter in ways that
anyone can appreciate, even if they don’t agree with it? Can a
movie about spirituality be inclusive rather than divisive? Yes. Hell
yes. Writer-director Emilio Estevez has pulled it off with his very
powerful and deeply moving The Way, and I say that as someone
who is not at all religious, as someone who is if fact actively
disdainful of religion.
Martin Sheen is a mourning father who travels
from California to France to collect the body of his adventurous son
(Estevez himself, in a few brief yet touching flashbacks), who died
in an accident at the beginning of the Camino de Santiago, an ancient
500-mile hike/pilgrimage through rural France and into Spain.
To
honor his son, Sheen’s Tom decides to do the trek himself, and
along the way befriends other unlikely pilgrims (played by Deborah
Kara Unger, James Nesbitt and Yorick van Wageningen) with their own
exceptional reasons for the journey.
It’s as if Estevez has updated
The Canterbury Tales for the 21st century and made an
on-the-road movie for our existentially confused times, in which
grief and understanding and acceptance aren’t always about losing a
loved one but also about figuring out what is worth hanging on to,
metaphysically speaking, and what is worth letting go of.
Miraculously (pun intended), Estevez has captured a sense of
spirituality as a universal human experience that is as robustly
physical and carnal as it is cerebral, and one that does not
necessarily have to have anything to do with the supernatural. Grade: A
Opens Oct. 21. Check out theaters and show times, see the trailer and get theater details here.
