The Way Back, plus 11 movies to stream at home during self isolation
A mostly spoiler-free review of Ben Affleck's latest film, followed by 11 movies you can stream while you're stuck at home for the foreseeable future
When the first and second trailers for The Way Back dropped in the fall and winter, my initial impulse was that I planned to watch the film as soon as it was released in March — that much I knew within the first few seconds. I see many movies, and this one checked all the right boxes. Ben Affleck. A wounded person trying to heal. Sports. I was in immediately.
My second reaction, which manifested itself as soon as the trailers ended, was one of disappointment. They completely spoiled the ending to the film, I thought. The entire purpose of the movie was ruined, I figured.
The end of Trailer 1:
The end of Trailer 2:
That is not the face of Affleck playing a coach who is upset that his team just lost the big game at the end of the movie. That is the face of Affleck playing a coach overcome with joy that his team — against all odds, I’m guessing, because it is a sports flick — won the big game at the end of the movie.
I was mad because a sports movie hinges on the moment they decided to include in the trailer. You know the moment I’m talking about. When the broadcast switches from the fake to real feed of Al Michaels asking if we believe in miracles just as the clock expires and the U.S. men’s ice hockey team vanquishes the Soviet Union at the 1980 Winter Olympics.
It’s the moment we all suspect is coming when the film begins, which means landing it can be particularly tricky. So, I don’t want to see snippets of it before the moment arrives. We only get to experience it for a first time once. I’d rather have that moment come as the crescendo to a movie that teased us for two hours. A sports movie’s final celebration scene can make or break a movie — it’s why I legitimately love Miracle, even if the opening 90 minutes are mostly whatever. Without an effective moment of jubilation, one that induces chills or tears, a sports movie is like a non-alcoholic beer.
There’s just not much of a point.
I saw The Way Back on Thursday, and I wasn’t wrong. The moment teased in the trailers did not hold up during the movie. It played fine. It certainly wasn’t bad. But I didn’t feel the same way I did at the end of Miracle. It was like, okay, I knew this moment was coming. I’m happy for the coach and his players. But I’m not getting chills or tearing up. I’m not going to remember the movie for this moment. It was forgettable.
It turns out, none of it really matters, because The Way Back is not a sports movie. That much I was wrong about. I want to make that clear. If you were thinking about seeing it because it is a sports movie, you might be disappointed. If you didn’t want to see it because it looked like a corny sports movie, you might be surprised. The Way Back is a sports movie as much as Arrival is a Star Wars movie.
That’s a good thing. My biggest concern heading into the movie was that the sports would feel fake. Just listen to the snippets of Affleck coaching his team in the trailer and you’ll hear phrases like “Keep pressing. Trapping. Taking charges," and “They don’t know what it’s like to get knocked down and have to get back up again. They don’t what it is to fight,” which sure, are all sports things, but I’d hope a coach would have more to offer to his team than the things I shout at my TV. At another point in the trailer, a player says “We have to trust each other. We have to have faith.” Those things aren’t unimportant. They’re things players and coaches actually say in the heat of battle, because nobody genuinely believes in cliches more than athletes. But they also come across as corny, manufactured, and, well, Hollywoody.
None of that matters really, because The Way Back isn’t trying to be a sports movie. It’s a movie about a broken person putting himself back together again. Basketball is just part of the movie. The celebratory scene I’ve been referencing doesn’t occur at the end of the film. Its placement is closer to the middle than the end. It is not the movie’s emotional crescendo. The basketball scenes aren’t even that frequent. The games are shot more like montages until a final score is slapped on screen mid-montage, almost like director Gavin O'Connor wanted to speed through them in order to get to the good stuff. Here’s where it’s worth noting that O’Connor directed Miracle. So, he knows how to shoot the shit out of a celebratory scene. The absence of a Miracle-like moment in The Way Back is intentional. It was a genuine choice — to make sure the sports didn’t overshadow the human part of the movie.
This was never a sports movie.
“The hardest part of the movie for Ben was really the basketball,” O’Connor told The New York Times. “If you’ve never really played before, being on a court is like, you know, being on ice skates for the first time. Once that part clicked, we were cooking with gasoline. He was already ready to go to really deep, dark places with the drinking.”
In the movie, Affleck plays …
a former basketball player who threw away a scholarship to Kansas just to piss off his dad.
a father who lost his son to cancer.
a husband who lost his wife to a separation in the aftermath of their son’s death.
a full-fledged alcoholic — his daily routine involves shower beers, a cooler of beer he keeps in the car, whiskey in a thermos that he drinks while working a construction job, a fridge packed with beers, a freezer always loaded with one beer so that it’s perfectly chilled, and nightly drinks at his neighborhood dive bar until someone makes him stop drinking and drags him home. He repeats this routine.
a man who is broken and doesn’t want to put himself back together.
The movie is really about this broken man trying to heal. First, he needs to want to heal, an important step that he only takes because of his new job as a basketball coach — that’s how sports plays a role in the film. Then, he actually tries to heal, but as most healing processes tend to go, he suffers setbacks along the way. That’s why the celebratory basketball scene takes place with close to an hour of the film remaining. The process of healing doesn’t follow the same trajectory as his basketball team.
I like stories — art — about broken people trying to put the pieces back together. It’s probably why my favorite thing ever in the world is Brand New, a band that has a website called FightOffYourDemons.com, and during its 18-year run, chronicled a journey from “I’m sinking like a stone in the sea” to “I am on the mend / At least now I can say that I am trying” to “I'm on my way to Hell / Well, I've tried, God knows that I've tried” to finally, “I finally found all my courage / It was buried under the house / Not just a manic depressive / Toting around my own cloud / I’ve got a positive message / Sometimes I can’t get it out.”
Whether or not the struggle resonates comes down to the sincerity. It doesn’t matter so much what they’re saying. It’s more about how they’re saying it and if you believe in the sincerity of their struggle.
The struggle Affleck’s character undergoes in The Way Back is genuine. There’s a level of sincerity to the journey he undergoes that is difficult to ignore given all that we know about Affleck’s personal life. It’s a deeply personal performance — arguably his best since Good Will Hunting, in which he also played a construction worker, oddly enough. But in Good Will Hunting, Affleck was supporting Matt Damon’s titular character. Affleck carries The Way Back.
“It’s probably the performance I’m the most proud of,” Affleck told GQ.
A fun game (if you’re a movie nerd like me) is to replace the lead actor in a movie with another actor in the same tier of acting and ask if the movie would’ve worked as well as it did after the substitution. I don’t think Affleck is a better actor than, say, Damon. But I also don’t think this movie works if it had been Damon in Affleck’s place.
The movie only works because of Affleck’s performance. And the performance only works because it is a deeply personal performance. You believe in what he’s suffering through, because it feels genuine and authentic.
Affleck hasn’t lost a child to cancer. He’s not a construction worker. But he has been through a (very public) divorce (with Jennifer Garner).
“The biggest regret of my life is this divorce,” Affleck told The New York Times. “Shame is really toxic. There is no positive byproduct of shame. It’s just stewing in a toxic, hideous feeling of low self-worth and self-loathing.”
He’s also a recovering alcoholic.
“It took me a long time to fundamentally, deeply, without a hint of doubt, admit to myself that I am an alcoholic,” he said. “The next drink will not be different.”
During the promotion cycle for the film, Affleck was brutally honest and open, broken and bruised, but also reflective and sincere. He was honest to the point where it might even make you uncomfortable knowing such intimate details of his struggle.
“I drank relatively normally for a long time,” he said. “What happened was that I started drinking more and more when my marriage was falling apart. This was 2015, 2016. My drinking, of course, created more marital problems.”
He also didn’t run from the similarities his character faces.
“People with compulsive behavior, and I am one, have this kind of basic discomfort all the time that they’re trying to make go away,” he said. “You’re trying to make yourself feel better with eating or drinking or sex or gambling or shopping or whatever. But that ends up making your life worse. Then you do more of it to make that discomfort go away. Then the real pain starts. It becomes a vicious cycle you can’t break. That’s at least what happened to me.”
It happens to his character too. The basketball makes him better briefly. It feels like he’s turned a corner. Until the corner turns into a path that plunges into the depths of despair. Suddenly, he’s right back where the pain began.
Affleck has been to rehab more than once. He suffered a very public relapse as recently as October. He called it “embarrassing.”
But he’s trying. That’s why the relapse shouldn’t be an embarrassment. It feels like he’s doing the best that he can. And that should be enough.
“The older I’ve gotten, the more I recognize that my dad did the best he could,” Affleck said. “There’s a lot of alcoholism and mental illness in my family. The legacy of that is quite powerful and sometimes hard to shake.”
That last part reminded me of the chorus of Degausser, the fourth song on Brand New’s third album, The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me: “I can’t shake this little feeling, I’ll never get anything right.” Throughout the song, “Take apart your head” is repeated three times. Once, it’s followed by “Chew it up and swallow it.” Another time, it’s followed by “Take apart the demon in the attic to the left.” It’s a song (at least partly) about how devastatingly depression can wreck a person. It puts us inside a fucked up brain. As Kevin Devine once put it, “Degausser was the one that was wild. I knew this guy well, we shared all the buttons in our lives, but I felt like I was eavesdropping on something when I listened to that song. I still do.”
Over a decade later, Brand New released their fifth (and likely final) album, Science Fiction. On Waste, the third song, the line is almost repeated, but it’s slightly twisted to: “Take your head apart.” It’s followed up immediately by “Free your own heart.” It’s a cathartic moment of optimism for a band that used to only ever write sad fucking shit. The album is loaded with concepts the band tackled on previous albums. Except on Science Fiction, Brand New demonstrated signs of growth and progress. At the very least, they’re trying.
Recovery isn’t easy. It’s never a straight line. Relapses are common. Fighting off your demons isn’t as simple as winning a war. There are multiple battles. The tide swings back and forth. There are wins and losses. But that just makes the wins that much more rewarding. We should savor them, because losses along the way are inevitable.
“It’s not particularly healthy for me to obsess over the failures — the relapses — and beat myself up,” Affleck said. “I have certainly made mistakes. I have certainly done things that I regret. But you’ve got to pick yourself up, learn from it, learn some more, try to move forward.”
The Way Back is a win for Affleck the movie star, as he tries to rebound from a disappointing five-year stretch of movies since an awesome five-year run that included The Town, Argo, and Gone Girl. At 47, when it looked like his career might be fading ever so slightly after his remarkable comeback, Affleck hit a home run that unfortunately won’t be reflected in the box office due to reasons outside of his control.
More importantly, the film also might be a win for Affleck the man, who by the sound of it, used The Way Back as a way to move forward and continue his process of healing. In that sense, the box office is irrelevant.
“I think that Ben, in an artistic way, in a deeply human way,” O’Connor said, “wanted to confront his own issues through this character and heal.”
It won’t come as a surprise to hear that when I saw The Way Back last week, my theater was entirely empty. I was literally the only person in the theater. I imagine it’ll be the last movie I see in theaters for the foreseeable future as I try to minimize my chances of playing a role in the spread of coronavirus. I also imagine that you won’t be seeing The Way Back in theaters as you hopefully spend the coming weeks at home in an attempt to “flatten the curve.” This isn’t an individual fight. It’ll take a collective effort.
With that in mind, I decided to highlight 11 movies that are available on streaming platforms. I won’t go for low-hanging fruit. I won’t mention Star Wars (Disney+) or Inglourious Basterds (Netflix) — stuff like that. I also won’t go for completely obscure titles. Chances are, you’ve seen some of these movies or at the very least, heard of them. But I also tried to pick movies that I find rewatchable. There’s a good chance I’ll write about some of these movies in depth at a later point. Next week, I’ll almost definitely write about a movie that’s available for streaming at home.
But for now, here are the 11 movies I came up with, in alphabetical order …
Annihilation (Amazon Prime)
Even if you’ve seen this one, it’s the kind of movie that demands multiple rewatches so you can figure out what the hell is going on. It stars Natalie Portman. It’s written and directed by the great Alex Garland. And it’s a trippy as fuck science fiction movie about … depression … maybe? Garland fought hard for his vision, which ended up costing his film a wide international release. But to me, this film is an example of the best the science fiction genre can offer on the big screen. Big ideas. Great acting. A few spine-tingling sequences. And questions that lack easy answers. I’m still not entirely sure what the movie is about, and I’ve seen it four or five times. I absolutely adore it.
Blood Diamond (Hulu)
My hottest movie take might be that Blood Diamond is a top five Leonardo DiCaprio movie — both in terms of his performance and the quality of the film. It’s the kind of thriller that doesn’t often get made anymore. A fun, quest, adventure tale with multiple heartbreaking angles, it holds up on repeat viewings. Also, I wish Jennifer Connelly was in more movies.
Destroyer (Hulu)
Okay, I’m willing to bet most of y’all haven’t seen this one. It’s a movie I am planning on writing about at some point for The Long Shot. It was one of my favorite movies of 2018. It stars Nicole Kidman in probably my favorite performance of hers as an alcoholic cop reckoning with a mistake she made in her past when someone from that same past resurfaces. Like The Way Back, it’s about a broken person trying to grieve and put herself back together. It’s a slow burn that oozes in atmosphere.
Ex Machina (Netflix)
I wrote about this at length last week. So if you haven’t seen this movie (also by Alex Garland) about artificial intelligence, go watch it and then maybe read three-thousand words about it.
Logan Lucky (Amazon Prime)
If you like the Ocean’s movies (same director), Daniel Craig doing an over-the-top accent (like he did in Knives Out), Adam Driver doing weird comedy, Channing Tatum, or heist movies, watch this. It rules.
The Aeronauts (Amazon Prime)
A film that was released theatrically in the fall, it reunites Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne for the first time since The Theory of Everything. Unlike The Theory of Everything, The Aereonauts is not Oscar bait. It’s mostly a survival movie about two people in a hot air balloon. Jones gives a remarkable performance in her most physical role since Rogue One. The movie is not exceptional. It’s not going to blow you away. But it’s a better than good survival flick with a legitimately great performance from Jones, who always delivers.
The Place Beyond The Pines (Netflix)
Oh man, I worshipped this movie when it came out in 2013. My friend Sam and I (shoutout to Sam, who is a subscriber, doesn’t ever open these emails, but has assured me she’s going to read them all at some point later, smh) were borderline obsessed with it. Ryan Gosling teams up with Ben Mendelsohn to rob banks so that he can provide for Eva Mendes and their kid, but Mendes is with another man, played by Mahershala Ali. You’ve also got Bradley Cooper, who makes the transition from cop to politician. The final act is about the sons of both Gosling and Cooper. The movie is split into three distinct acts. So, it’s not entirely a bank-robbing movie. It’s more about fathers and sons. It’s a little slow and lengthy, but the ambition of the film is admirable. Plus, I mean, just look at that cast. It’s stacked beyond belief.
Then Came You (Netflix)
This movie isn’t great. It’s a familiar take on a familiar topic: teenage girl gets diagnosed with cancer, meets a boy, and so on. It doesn’t necessarily add anything new to the genre. But here’s what’s important: Maisie Williams (you know her as Arya Stark) plays the cancer patient and she submits a legitimately great performance. There’s a lot of sappy mediocre movies on Netflix. This might be one of them. But it’s the good kind of sappy. Don’t think too hard about it and just go where it takes you.
Upgrade (HBO GO)
I went into this movie knowing nothing about it and it blew me away. I never saw Venom with Tom Hardy because I don’t see most superhero movies — especially the ones that get shitty reviews — but I know there are a ton of story similarities between the two movies, even down to the fact that Upgrade stars Logan Marshall-Green, aka Discount Tom Hardy.
The major difference between the two movies? Upgrade is a near-perfect movie for what it’s trying to be (a fun as hell science fiction action movie) and Venom is supposedly terrible.
Vox Lux (Hulu)
This movie is not for everyone. It’s polarizing. But I loved it. I think it’s a better version of A Star Is Born. I think Natalie Portman gives one of the best performances of her career as a pop star in utter disarray. Others hate this movie. They think Portman’s performance is overcooked. Whatever. This was one of my favorite movies of 2018. It’s strange and dark as hell, but I couldn’t take my eyes off it or stop thinking about it afterwards.
Coming soon: A newsletter only about Natalie Portman, because she’s the absolute best.
What If (Amazon Prime)
This is one of my favorite rom-coms that I rewatch somewhat frequently even though I don’t even like rom-coms. It’s got Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). Their respective love interests are played by Zoe Kazan (who you should remember from The Big Sick, another good movie on Amazon Prime) and Mackenzie Davis (The Martian, Blade Runner 2049, the newest Terminator installment). The cast slays, which turns this redundant story of best friends falling in love into a rewatchable movie. With all due respect to Driver’s performances in Marriage Story, The Last Jedi, and The Report (and so one), this scene might be his finest moment as an actor.
You won’t be surprised by anything in What If, but that’s okay. It’s pleasant, familiar, and comforting.
We could all use some of that right now as the world around us falls apart.
So you, of course, claim Affleck is coming off a disappointing 5-year stretch, a stretch where he was Batman in 3 movies(although just a cameo in Suicide Squad) and did the Accountant. I'll give you Live by Night was a bit muddled and missing some essential elements to make a good period piece. But did you even see the DC stuff? His take on an older, tired Bruce Wayne/Batman was excellent. And while Batman v Superman's theatrical cut was lacking, the extended version fills in many of the problems. And while I agree Justice falls way short of the bar Marvel's team-up movies set, it's still enjoyable. In fact, I feel it was hurt more from the change in director's than anything else.
I just think it's a disservice to dismiss those 5 years when not only did he do a great job in those 3 films, they also made a ton of money. I'm really curious if you saw any of them.
Now onto the suggestions, #1 is an awful confusing mess of a movie. Garland is a genius, but this movie falls short. Any movie that you have to watch multiple times to try to make sense of, is a failure by the director when at no time will you actually discover what his vision was pertaining to said movie. But I will give you the movie is pretty, and there are a few scenes that could slip the movie into sci-fi horror, as a total package the movie falls short.
#4 is a much better use of time and effort by Garland. He also wrote Dredd, Sunshine, and 28 Days Later...all better than Annihilation.
#9 Upgrade is a fantastic movie. If you like sci-fi or even action/horror this movie hits all the right notes. But I don't like how you compare it to a movie you haven't seen. In fact, there are very few similarities between the two movies. The main one that most would focus on is the controlling of the human body, a computer chip in Upgrade and an alien parasite in Venom. And while Venom is far from a perfect movie it's nowhere near as bad as many critics make it out to be. I just find it annoying how you go out of your way to badmouth movies you haven't seen and obviously have a bias towards.