Sparkling Sheen

Charlie’s dad and brother craft a poignant tale of pilgrimage, companionship and loss

(Dec. 8, 2011) Reviews

THE WAY. Within the Sheen/Estevez dynasty, younger, louder brother Charlie has been taking his share of the spotlight lately. Meanwhile, elder Emilio has been quietly building a career as a writer and director, starting in 1986 with Wisdom and carrying through to The Way, now playing at the Minor.

The Way

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I’m a big fan of Estevez’s second directorial effort, Men at Work (1990), an unassuming buddy comedy about garbage men in SoCal taking on both a murder plot and a large-scale industrial pollution ring. It stars the brothers Estevez and a scene-stealing Keith David as a Vietnam veteran with unresolved PTSD. It’s an enjoyable, if now pretty dated movie, and it is nothing at all like The Way.

Apparently while I’ve been reveling in nostalgia, revisiting the heyday of Hollywood action comedy, Estevez has been maturing as a filmmaker. Go figure. The result of that maturity is a controlled, honest, emotional little movie about fathers and sons, the meaning of faith and human questing.

Martin Sheen plays the central character, a Californian ophthalmologist named Tom. Tom’s relationship with his only son, Daniel (played in flashbacks by Estevez), has grown increasingly strained since the death of Tom’s wife/Daniel’s mother. Adding to this tension is Daniel’s decision to forgo completing his doctorate to travel the world. These travels eventually take him to the Camino de Santiago, where he is killed by inclement weather. Tom travels to the French Pyrenees, where the Camino begins, to recover Daniel’s remains.

The Camino, also called The Way of St. James, is a 500-mile pilgrimage route from France to Spain, undertaken on foot by the devout (and not-so-devout) for more than 1,000 years. It becomes clear as the story progresses that a number of factors, his son’s death obviously not least among them, have contributed to the diminution of Tom’s faith in God or church — call it what you will. For reasons he doesn’t even understand, Tom picks up where Daniel left off, and sets off on the two-month traverse of the Camino.

Along the way Tom gradually accumulates a ragtag group of hangers-on: Joost, the big-hearted, toking Dutchman; Sarah, the battered, embittered Canadian; and Jack, the florid, loud-mouthed Irishman with writer’s block. While Tom is undeniably the central character, his interactions with these companions give the movie a narrative flow and allow him to show more of himself.

More than anything, this is an actor’s picture, and Sheen gives an impressively understated performance as a man forced to reckon with his spiritual identity. He spends most of the movie walking, angrily sulking and silently looking inward. When he interacts with his fellow pilgrims, his bitterness, grief and latent frustration come bubbling to the surface. Tom is a complex, fully formed character, and Sheen really gets inside his skin, bringing to life all the strain and tumult of six-plus decades of life on Earth.

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