108 min | R | March 6, 2020 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A washed-up basketball star drinks himself toward oblivion until his old school hands him a losing team to coach. The kids need a leader. He needs a reason to get out of bed. The game was never the thing that was killing him.
Jack Cunningham was a high school basketball star who walked away from the game and never explained why. Now he drinks. He drinks in the morning, at work, in the shower, and at the bar until the bartender pours him into a cab. When his old Catholic school asks him to coach their failing team, he takes the job because he has nothing else. The Way Back wears the costume of a sports redemption story, but it is really a film about a man drowning in grief and using basketball as a life raft he does not believe he deserves.
Ben Affleck plays Jack with a heaviness that sits in his shoulders and his eyes. He does not perform the addiction. He inhabits the dull, functional rhythm of a man who has organized his entire life around the next drink. The film never lets him off the hook with a triumphant speech, and Affleck never reaches for one. Al Madrigal plays Dan, the assistant coach, with a patient decency that gives Jack someone to push against. Michaela Watkins plays Beth, Jack’s sister, who watches her brother dissolve and cannot stop it. Glynn Turman plays Doc, the team chaplain, with a quiet authority that keeps the locker room honest.
Gavin O’Connor directs from a script by Brad Ingelsby, and the two of them refuse to let the basketball solve the problem. O’Connor films the games with handheld immediacy, but he cuts away from the wins to return to Jack alone in his apartment with a beer. The editing keeps undercutting the momentum the genre demands. Eduard Grau’s cinematography drains the color from the working-class town and the dim bars, then finds a clinical brightness in the gym that feels like the one clear place in Jack’s life. The score stays restrained and lets the silences do the heavy work.
The film hits the familiar beats of the underdog team finding its footing, and those scenes are the weakest part. The story comes alive when it abandons the scoreboard and stays with Jack’s wreckage. O’Connor and Ingelsby understand that recovery is not a season that ends with a trophy. It is a daily refusal that never finishes. The Way Back has the discipline to deny its hero a clean victory, and that honesty is worth more than the formula it borrows.