Getting Lost Along The Way

The Way
Currently at AMC Fullerton
With Martin Sheen, Deborah Kara Unger,
James Nesbitt and Yorick van Wageningen
Directed by Emilio Estevez
Four Scoops of Bosco

With "The Way," writer-director Emilio Estevez has made a respectable failure.

What's respectable - and undeniable - is that this is a sincere effort to make a film of sensitivity and spiritual richness. Every so often, there's a glimmer of the movie Estevez was trying to make and thought he was making. But then in the next moment, it's gone, lost in an onrush of clumsy scenes and canned characters mouthing false dialogue.

Estevez seems to be trying to do for his father, Martin Sheen, what John Huston did for Walter Huston in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" - direct Dad to an Academy Award. Sheen was clearly ready for that. In one scene, as a California doctor in Europe to claim the body of his son, he stands in a morgue and has to identify the remains. It's difficult to do a big acting moment when the whole audience is expecting one. In those conditions, actors usually underact. But Sheen's reaction is instinctive and effective, not overdone, but primal.

Yet the role itself is a dud. Sheen plays Tom, a stodgy ophthalmologist, whose life is disrupted when his free-spirited son is killed in a hiking accident along the El Camino de Santiago, which goes from France to Spain. Once arrived in Europe, Tom decides to use his son's gear to complete the hike - actually a 500-mile pilgrimage. Yet Tom remains a one-note character, curt and ungiving. Estevez never shows Tom laughing except in montage sequences, and we're left wondering what could possibly make this man laugh.

At first, "The Way" looks as if it's going to be about Tom's spiritual journey. Instead, "The Way" becomes a movie about the culture of the pilgrimage itself, the people who do it and the things that happen along the way. So we meet a jolly Dutchman (Yorick van Wageningen), an angry Canadian (Deborah Kara Unger) and an insufferably talkative and boring Irish guidebook writer (James Nesbitt) in the grip of writer's block.

Humble question: How is it possible to suffer from writer's block while writing a guidebook? A novel yes, but a guidebook? What kind of wimp is that?

Aside from van Wageningen, who makes something of the Dutchman, the characters are impossible to believe, and their interaction rings false at every turn. At one point, Estevez writes a speech for Unger in which she equates her sorrow over a long-ago abortion with the father's grief over his dead son, and this goes by without comment. The woman is supposedly on the pilgrimage to quit smoking - not a bad idea, as the sight of the emaciated Unger smoking is almost as disturbing as watching Bette Davis in "Wicked Stepmother."

Perhaps the biggest mistake Estevez makes is the casting of himself as Tom's son in flashback. It makes the whole enterprise feel like a vanity product, and Estevez is the wrong age for the role. At one point, he decides not to complete his doctorate, and you can't help but think, "Doctorate? He's pushing 50. He should be chairing his department by now."

Reviewed by Mick LaSalle
Mr. LaSalle reviews film for the San Francisco Chronicle