Pilgrim’s progress
In 2010, Martin Sheen and his son, Emilio Estevez, teamed up to make The Way. It quickly became the most watched big-screen drama ever made about walking the Camino. Michael Doherty reports
You o en hear lm-makers describing their nished projects as labours of love. In most cases, that’s just sound-bite hokum, but it’s certainly true of e Way. For their seventh movie collaboration together, Emilio Estevez and his father, Martin Sheen, combined their passions for faith and family to tell a story about El Camino de Santiago ( e Way of St James), the pilgrimage route to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, where legend has it the remains of the apostle, St James the Great, are buried.
Eight years earlier, Martin Sheen and Emilio’s son, Taylor, drove along that self-same route, not far from where Martin’s own father was brought up. Taylor found love on that journey and now lives there with his family. Martin declared that he would come back some day and walk the Camino. No surprise then that when Emilio came to his father looking to collaborate on a movie project, the Camino experience should have been uppermost in both their minds. Written and directed by Emilio, e Way begins with a young, free-spirited pilgrim (played by Estevez) fatally injuring himself while making the Camino trek. Having initially own to Europe to collect the body, the boy’s conservative, golf-playing, country club father (Sheen), decides to honour his son’s memory by completing the 800-kilometre journey and to deposit his son’s ashes along the way. En route, Sheen gets to discover a lot about himself, not least through the companions he encounters on this journey of self-realisation.
In lesser hands, this could have been a mawkish, Dr Phil special about people
nding themselves; being on a personal road to Damascus, etc. While it’s not without its sentimentality, e Way is a moving, entertaining tale with echoes of both e
Wizard of Oz (1939) and e Canterbury
Tales (1944). Martin Sheen delivers a pitchperfect, heartfelt performance in the lead role.
His companions along the Camino, a Dutch dude (Yorick van Wageningen), an emotionally damaged Canadian woman (Deborah Unger), and a blocked Irish writer (James Nesbitt) occasionally veer towards caricature but they do provide an entertaining counterpoint to the main business at hand: a grieving father paying tribute to his son.
On the production front, e Way is beautifully photographed by Juan Miguel Azpiroz and features a sweeping score from Tyler Bates. Estevez shot the movie quickly and without fuss. ere were no fancy trailers, no luxuries, and while some of the pilgrims had been informed of the movie; others clearly hadn’t (at various points you see the shock on the faces of walkers in the background as they suddenly recognise Sheen.) At a time when our screens, big and small, are bursting with superheroes and screeching cars, there’s always room for a simple, re ective tale. e Way ticks that box.
There’s always room for a simple, reflective tale