![]() ![]() In the gulag, one finds he can survive through his knack for storytelling: he starts reciting what he remembers of Stevenson's Treasure Island, and a saucer-eyed crowd of murderous tough guys are held spellbound, promising pieces of bread if he can continue. There is something surreal in seeing the group, in long-shot, inching like insects through the snowy wastes of Siberia, or the rippling vastness of the Gobi desert, tormented by what may or may not be mirages of oases – another pleasingly old-fashioned touch. Messy, contradictory details like this, paradoxically, argue for the story's reality. In fact, that isn't exactly what happens, and, a little disconcertingly, Valka turns out to have a sentimental regard for Stalin. Valka is apparently set up to be the heart-of-gold lowlife who is surely destined to redeem himself by taking one for the team just before the final credits. Among his group are an enigmatic American, known only as "Mr Smith", played by Ed Harris as a grizzled cynic Zoran, played by Romanian actor Dragos Bucur enigmatic Irena, played by Saoirse Ronan, who joins them on the road, and a gangster called Valka, played by Colin Farrell – a professional criminal who joins the escape party purely to get away from other mobsters inside who want to kill him over gambling debts. Here, Janusz meets mercurial former actor Khabarov (Mark Strong) whose tall tales of escape inspire him to make a break. (Weir may be alluding here to a very similar speech from the Japanese camp commandant at the beginning of Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai.) Janusz is sent to the Siberian gulag for 20 years, a terrifying place where the inmates are told by the commander that it is not the barbed wire, guards and dogs that make up their prison but the vast and forbidding landscape itself. However, even if disbelieved in the literal sense, The Way Back is still an engaging, old-fashioned piece of storytelling.Īt its centre is Janusz, played earnestly though also sometimes with a slightly flavourless efficiency, by the 29-year-old British actor Jim Sturgess he is a Pole whose young wife is tortured by the Soviets into denouncing him as a spy. This, in fact, is the idea suggested in one late sequence: a historical newsreel montage showing the Poles' postwar communist rule, the Hungarian uprising, the Solidarity trade union, the fall of the Berlin Wall etc, all with a pair of trudging boots at the top of the frame. Of course, if it simply didn't happen at all, to anyone, then readers and movie audiences are entitled to ask what value the story has – except, conceivably, as an image for humanity's long, persistent slog away from the prison of Soviet tyranny. Weir has reportedly added more background material with extended research and survivor interviews of his own. There are suggestions that it is entirely fictional, or that Rawicz appropriated and conflated other people's apocryphal tales. Since publication, his account has been disputed. In his book, he claimed that with a group of other prisoners he pulled off a daring escape during a blizzard in 1941 against incredible odds, and fired by an overwhelming need to survive, this group reportedly managed the astonishing feat of trekking thousands of miles to safety in British India. This source material was a bestseller by the Polish army lieutenant Slavomir Rawicz, who was imprisoned by the Soviets after their invasion of 1939, accused of spying and sent to the Siberian gulag. Its veracity was in question even before it was put through the movie mill. It is "inspired" by a true story, which may unfortunately have been itself merely "inspired" by what its author claims to be the truth. F or his first film in seven years, Peter Weir has chosen to tell an epic tale with a panoramic sweep, in the manner of David Lean.
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