‘YOU DON’T choose a life. You live one.” So says the protagonist’s free-thinking son in this queasy though undeniably watchable self-help exercise from portions of the Sheen clan.
Your tolerance for The Waycan probably be measured by your ability to draw anything meaningful from that empty aphorism. Surely, we both live and choose our lives? Don't we? Never mind.
Emilio Estevez, lately more often found behind the camera than before it, directs his father, Martin Sheen, in a tale set along the pilgrimage route – the so-called Camino de Santiago – leading to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia.
Sheen plays Tom Avery, a conservative optometrist, who, while playing a game of golf, learns that his son (a sometimes ghostly turn by the director) has died while walking the titular thoroughfare. After identifying the body, Tom becomes intrigued by the ancient pilgrimage and, ramming the lad’s ashes into his rucksack, begins the long tramp towards that distant cathedral.
The racial cliches and lazy characterisation are something to behold. After meeting a Dutchman who smokes dope and a Spaniard who wants to be a bullfighter, the domestic viewer might reasonably wonder when a twinkly, blocked Irish wordsmith will make an appearance. About a third of the way through, as it happens. James Nesbitt does the unwanted honours.
One can detect gestures towards The Canterbury Tales, but, featuring characters who all require one clean answer to one clean life crisis, the film actually has more in common with The Wizard of Oz. Deborah Kara Unger needs a cure for cynicism. Nesbitt needs to write again. And so forth. The implication that the Christian God is an empty construct composed of curtains and antique paraphernalia is surely unintended.
For all its clunkiness, however, The Waydoes work as a quasi-spiritual soap opera. Much of the praise must be directed towards Sheen, who makes something fleshy and flawed of his flatly written role. The film is pretty. It's well-meaning. It's humane. Oh, if it only had a brain.
