Beautifully shot comeback drama that reminds us what Ben Affleck is capable of
Finding the Way Back
Dir Gavin O’connor
Starring Ben Affleck, Al Madrigal, Janina Gavankar, Michaela Watkins, Brandon Wilson, Will Ropp
Robbie Collin
Finding the Way Back feels like an apt title for the new Ben Affleck film. Following celebrity overexposure in the early Noughties, Affleck began to age into something of a new-school Hollywood stalwart.
He directed three well-received features for Warner Bros, the last of which, Argo, won the Best Picture Oscar in 2013. And bookending this already-hot streak were his two finest performances to date, as Superman actor George Reeves in Hollywoodland and the hapless husband in Gone Girl.
But then in 2013, Affleck was cast as Batman and that seemed to pause this fruitful mid-period. His career, and certainly profile, became all-butconsumed by the ill-fated DCU franchise, while outside of work he weathered multiple stints in rehab for alcoholism and, in 2018, divorce.
This latest project, Affleck’s first after formally stepping down from his superhero commitments, isn’t quite a triumphant return to form, but at least reminds us of what he’s capable of bringing to the table.
The film itself is something of a comeback drama, about a man whose sense of purpose has been obscured by alcoholism and heartbreak. Affleck plays Jack Cunningham, a bearded, bearlike construction worker whose days begin with a beer in the shower and only get hazier from there, until he finally blacks out. This routine has calcified since his separation from his wife (The Morning Show’s Janina Gavankar) a little over a year ago, but it’s intriguingly punctured when the headmaster of his old Catholic high school (John Aylward) asks him to become their new basketball coach as, back in his youth, Jack was a champion himself. In a terrifically well-played scene, Affleck shows us Jack rehearsing the telephone call in which he intends to turn down the offer, and getting progressively drunker with every take.
The mechanics of alcoholism are observantly but unshowily captured, from the constant fridge-to-freezer shuffling of cans to the nervous triple-tap of Jack’s fingers on the rim of each one before he snaps open the ring pull. Yet the next morning, rather than making the call, he turns up at the court and starts work. At this point, a strong whiff of the underdog sports drama wafts in: naturally, the team is a ragtag bunch of stragglers, with personal issues of their own. But in his own faltering, imperfect but wellintentioned and occasionally inspired way, Jack helps them through, and helps himself in the process. Finding the
Way Back
– or rather “faith-based”, to use the current industry euphemism – but its portrayal of redemption as a day-in, day-out struggle rather than an uplifting, one-off hop, skip and jump back on to the righteous path does feel authentically Catholic.
The overall structure and game plan are nothing new, or even special, from the temporary withholding of a certain vital piece of Jack’s backstory for maximum impact to the flatly functional supporting roles played by Gavankar, Michaela Watkins (as Jack’s sister) and Al Madrigal (as the assistant coach). But both Affleck and director Gavin O’connor, who last worked together on the offbeat thriller The Accountant, aren’t just passing the time here, and consistently treat the material with a respect it doesn’t always obviously command.
Every scene is shot beautifully – not to mention intensely seriously – by director of photography Eduard Grau, while Rob Simonsen’s light-touch, piano-led score brings an emotional freshness to the kind of scenes we’ve seen many times before. It was released in the US this year as The Way Back,