Affleck plays Jack Cunningham, a lumbering,
middle-aged man who drinks all day, every day.
He cracks open a can in the shower. He pours
a little something into his coffee tumbler at his
construction job. He drinks on the drive to the
bar. He drinks in the bar. The next day he repeats
the cycle all over again.
He’s what you might call a functioning alcoholic,
although this state of drifting through life in a
booze-addled daze doesn’t make him happy.
He’s merely surviving in his sad, dirty apartment
until he gets a phone call from his past: The head
of his old high school, Bishop Hayes, wants him
to come back to the place he once ruled as an
all-star player to coach their currently less-than-
glorious basketball team.
It’s exactly what you’d expect, but the scenes
with the team are some of the best in the film
— funny and spirited and wholly engaging —
even if they do seem ripped from the playbook.
But “The Way Back” doesn’t fancy itself a typical
sports drama. It’s attempting to be more than
that with a lot of threads and side plots that
never quite develop to any satisfying end.
The basketball isn’t the focus. Jack is. And
this is a guy who’s got a lot of ghosts that the
movie takes its time to reveal. The script from
Brad Ingelsby and O’Connor withholds a fair
amount, perhaps to make “The Way Back” a
more accurate reflection of how often people’s
past troubles come up in everyday life. But in
retrospect, there’s a nagging sense that it was
just done for a cheap punch in the gut.
If there is an overriding problem with “The Way
Back,” it’s that: The whole thing feels a little like a
cheap punch in the gut. Of course an audience
is going to want to see Jack recover. Of course