“The Way” was released in 2010 and is soon back in theaters for a limited run. Around the time of its debut, one immediately assumed that movie stars Emilio Estevez and his father Martin Sheen, made this movie together with their troubled movie star brother/son Charlie Sheen in mind, in hopes that he’d see the need for a thorough soul-cleansing.
Like so many actors before Charlie, who succumbed to the excesses of Hollywood and successfully recovered (Robert Downey Jr. and Mickey Rourke being a couple of prime examples; not to mention Martin Sheen himself), one hoped “The Way” would give Charlie (who was going through a particularly toxic period at the time) a Road to Damascus type of revelation.
Regardless of Charlie’s personal journey, brother Emilio succeeded in creating a humanistic road-trip drama that offers an example of seeking meaning in one’s life during these complicated times. Which is undoubtedly why it’s being brought back. We need it now more than ever.
‘The Way’
Tom (Martin Sheen) is an ophthalmologist. His son Daniel (Emilio Estevez) is a seeker, who has called off his Ph.D. studies to walk the 1,000-year-old Camino de Santiago de Compostela, or Way of St. James, a network of old pilgrimage routes covering 760 km (about 475 miles), from St. Jean Pied de Port in southern France, to Santiago in Spain.
On the Camino, he meets a gregarious, chubby Dutchman named Joost (Yorick van Wageningen), whose quest is to lose weight; a cynical, angry Canadian (Deborah Kara Unger), whose quest is to quit smoking; and a garrulous Irish travel writer (James Nesbitt), who, while clearly having kissed the Blarney Stone, has writer’s block.
We follow them through the bucolic French and Basque countryside, along steep paths in the Pyrenees, through copses, vineyards, quaint inns, and hostels, and over hill and dale.
There’s more than a little of “The Wizard of Oz” about the way the group forms and the roles of the four main characters. They joke, offend, confront each other, have a tiny war, get drunk, philosophize, have adventures together, and end up bonding deeply.
Among the many interesting things about the film are the campfire debates about what constitutes a true pilgrim, and a true pilgrimage. A false pilgrim essentially indulges in empty virtue-signaling—eliminating suffering by riding bicycles, or horses, and indulging in creature comforts. And at one point our new friends collectively lapse into this type of blasé pilgrimage: They cheat by checking into a luxurious hotel with cognac and masseurs—compliments of Tom.
A real pilgrim is destitute, chooses suffering and the loss of comfort to gain soul-cleansing, that is, the (Christian) atonement of sin or the (Buddhist) repayment of karmic debt. This is visually depicted when the travelers eventually cross paths with a real, heavy-duty, old-school version of the pilgrimage: Silent monks carrying a massive, heavy wooden cross, with their backs bleeding from self-flagellation.
The modern pilgrimage depicted in the film would appear to be, in large part, about forming friendships. To be sure, deep bonds and sharing offer part of the soul-sea-change sought on a pilgrimage. But, as evidenced by the spiritually tough, deep-pain-forbearing monks, it’s still a far cry from the original version, where, in addition to the physical hardship, a profound, scorched-earth loneliness was key for a true cleansing of the soul.
“‘I essentially have nothing to promote today. ... Actually, I do have something to promote: I’m promoting sanity,’” he said. “‘I’m promoting a sense of nobility and a return to a more innocent place and just gratitude and knowing that whatever comes next, work-wise, that the version that I will deliver will be spectacular.’”
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