The team sucks, but Jack swears at them about toughness until they suddenly get a lot better. Jack is saddled with the school’s straitlaced algebra teacher as his assistant (a warm and grounded Al Madrigal), and the friction between their respective styles of coaching is low-key funny throughout.
#WATCH THE WAY BACK HOW TO#
One slam-dunk story beat follows another: The kids on the team are a bunch of slackers and showoffs who don’t know how to work together, and each player is distinguished by his own defining trait (one’s horny, one’s fat, one’s selfish, and so on). Imagine if the Gene Hackman and Dennis Hopper roles from “Hoosiers” were compressed into the same character, and you can basically predict where “The Way Back” goes from there. Twenty-four beers and a dark night of the soul later, Jack acquiesces. The team’s previous coach is out for the season with a heart attack (a possible side effect of losing every game of the season), and they need someone to sub in right away. You get the sense that Father Edward Devine (“E.R.” chief John Aylward) - the long-time principal of Bishop Hayes High School - has been informed that his school’s greatest former basketball star has fallen on hard times, but it could also just be an act of Devine providence.
Jack needs the kind of help he doesn’t know how to ask for, and that’s when someone unexpectedly puts their faith in him. But “Miracle” director O’Connor (who could make this kind of thing in his sleep) and screenwriter Brad Ingelsby head-fake expectations in a number of significant ways, avoiding the easy layups endemic to the sports genre in favor of a story that finds more drama in running drills than it does in playing the big game.
#WATCH THE WAY BACK MOVIE#
The raw and redemptive tale of a broken soul who starts piecing himself back together when he’s hired to coach his old high school basketball team, “The Way Back” only sounds like a movie that you’ve already seen 100 times because - in broad strokes - it is. < span data-mce-type=”bookmark” style=”display: inline-block width: 0px overflow: hidden line-height: 0 ” class=”mce_SELRES_start”> < /span> In fact, this sober little studio movie is so uncommonly effective because of its steady insistence that life can’t be lived in reverse that, contrary to its title, there’s no going back. It denies Affleck the crutch of his natural charisma, or the chance to hide behind a story that’s bigger than himself. In fact, it has more to do with how Gavin O’Connor’s modest and moving sports drama refuses to let its leading man reclaim something of his old screen persona. That’s not just because the meta-text of it all is so hard to ignore, and that Affleck shot this movie shortly after finishing a stint in rehab (the actor’s own misadventures with alcohol are chronicled by the tabloids, and his mea culpas by the Times).
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The 25 Most Momentous TV Deaths of This CenturyĪnd yet, his compellingly underplayed performance in “The Way Back” feels like it might be the most personal thing he’s ever done.
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