The Way Back

I watched The Way Back on a Tuesday afternoon in March 2020, sitting about three feet away from a container of Clorox wipes that I was treating like holy water. The world was ending, the NBA had just suspended its season, and there I was, watching a movie about a high school basketball coach. It was the last "normal" thing I did before the theatrical window shattered and every movie became a rectangle on my living room wall. Re-watching it recently, without the looming dread of a global lockdown, I realized something: this isn't a sports movie at all. It’s a ghost story where the ghost is still breathing.

The Meta-Weight of Ben Affleck

Let’s be honest: you aren’t just watching Jack Cunningham; you’re watching Ben Affleck. In the era of franchise saturation and de-aging tech, there is something startlingly tactile about seeing a movie star look this... puffy. This tired. Ben Affleck has spent the last decade oscillating between being the chin in the Bat-cowl and a tabloid fixture, but here, he strips away the "movie star" sheen. He plays Jack, a former basketball phenom who spends his days working construction and his nights drinking cans of beer in the shower.

I’ve seen plenty of "drunk" performances where actors do a lot of leaning and slurring, but Affleck plays it with a terrifying, functional precision. He looks like a guy who has calculated exactly how many drinks he can have and still hit his alarm clock in the morning. It’s a brave performance because it feels so unvarnished. You can see the echoes of his work in Gone Girl or even the weary competence of The Accountant, but here, the shield is gone. When he gets the call to coach his old high school team, the Bishop Hayes, he doesn’t have a "lightbulb" moment. He just has a slightly less miserable reason to get out of bed.

Subverting the "Hoops" Tropes

If you’re looking for Hoosiers or Coach Carter, you might find the first half familiar, but director Gavin O'Connor isn't interested in the "big game" catharsis. O’Connor, who previously gave us the bone-crunching sibling drama Warrior, knows that the court is just a stage for people to work out their trauma. The team is a disparate, ethnically mixed group of kids who feel like actual teenagers, not 27-year-old models in jerseys. Melvin Gregg as Marcus Parrish gives a really grounded performance as the team’s star who needs a push, but the movie wisely keeps the focus on Jack’s internal collapse.

The cinematography by Eduard Grau—who shot the hauntingly beautiful A Single Man—captures the gray, sun-bleached corners of Southern California. It doesn’t look like the postcard version of LA; it looks like the version you see when you’re hungover and the sun is too bright. The pacing is deliberate, reflecting the sluggishness of recovery. There’s a scene where Jack is trying to teach the kids a press defense, and for a second, you see the spark of the old athlete. But the movie refuses to let him (or us) off the hook. It’s essentially a character study disguised as a sports drama to trick dads into feeling things.

The Brutal Reality of the 2020 Release

The "contemporary" context of this film is inseparable from its release. The Way Back hit theaters on March 6th. By March 24th, Warner Bros. had pushed it to VOD because the theaters were padlocked. It became an early test case for the "premium VOD" model that defined the next two years of cinema. Because of that, it feels like a film that was swallowed by the moment, a "half-forgotten oddity" that deserved a longer life on the big screen.

The script by Brad Ingelsby (who would go on to write Mare of Easttown) avoids the easy ending. Most sports movies equate a winning season with a fixed life. The Way Back knows that you can win the championship and still wake up wanting to burn your house down. The third act takes a sharp, jagged turn away from the hardwood and into a grief-stricken reality that I didn't see coming. It deals with the loss of a child and the subsequent divorce from Angela (Janina Gavankar) with a quiet, devastating maturity. It reminds me that in our current era of "IP-driven" storytelling, there is still room for a mid-budget drama about a guy who is just fundamentally broken.

I’ll never forget the smell of the stale pretzels I was eating while I first watched this, convinced I’d never go to a cinema again. But even without the "end of the world" vibes, The Way Back stands as a high-water mark for Ben Affleck. It’s a film that respects the messiness of addiction too much to give you a clean finish. It’s about the slow, agonizing process of just showing up, even when the scoreboard is heavily tilted against you. If you missed it during the 2020 chaos, it’s time to head back to the court.