"The Way"

Where do spam emails come from?  I received one a week ago, and I'm glad I did.  It was an invitation to preview a new movie, "The Way."  I called my movie-loving friend Father Jim Garvey, and we agreed to meet at the theatre on Tuesday.

"The Way" is a small film which sneaks up on you.  No bombs, no car/train/plane chase scenes, no globe-trotting split-screen travel, it is much more like "real life" in the slow quiet little details which reveal much.

Tom Avery is a California eye doctor who gets a phone call on a golf course which changes his life.  His son has died in an accident in the Pyrenees in France.  He goes to claim a body, and to beat himself up for not being more understanding of his only child.  He finds out Daniel had begun walking the Camino de Santiago, the 800 kilometer pilgrimage path to the tomb of St. James the Apostle across northern Spain.  In a life-changing impulse, Tom decides to complete the walk his son never did.

And what a walk!  One of the characters in this film is the beauty of the countryside.  Mountains, fields, hillsides, grottos, villages, woods--God's creation is always there, unmentioned in the film yet moving in its ever-changing vistas.

On pilgrimage in true providential fashion Tom is joined by an unlikely group of companions:  Joost, a fat Dutchman with lots of weed, Sarah, a Canadian who says she's trying to quit smoking, and Jack, an irritating fast-talking Irish travel writer.  With hints of "The Wizard of Oz" and "Odysseus" the film unfolds with touching vignettes of their journey.  Each of the characters changes a little, and change each other.  I have to believe that there is also allusion to the Acts of the Apostles, and the first name of the earliest followers of Jesus the Christ, "the way."  (See Acts 9:2; 18:25; 19:9; 22:4)

To me the film is infused with a Catholic sensibility.  It takes people where they are, imperfect and with mixed motives, and allows the demands and stresses of pilgrimage to open up their awareness of their own humanity.  The way opens themselves to the presence of God. 

Pilgrimage is a common metaphor for life, yet every pilgrimage is different.  It is the gift of director Emilio Estevez (son of leading actor Martin Sheen) that the particularity of this Camino affects the particular characters and reveals them better to themselves.  Every person on a pilgrimage (whether one's life or a real physical journey) makes it alone.  But it is good to have companions on the way.

I doubt that "The Way" will make much money, or spend much time in theatres.  But definitely use On Demand or Netflix to see this touching and spiritual film.