This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Jan. 20, 2011 - "The Way Back" is the harrowing tale of a small group of prisoners, one of them an American, who escape from the Soviet gulag in Siberia in the early days of World War II and walk 4,000 miles to freedom in India. The movie, directed by the fine Australian filmmaker Peter Weir ("Gallipoli," "Fearless," "The Truman Show") is superbly acted, staged and filmed.
Although the journey itself is somewhat repetitive (the movie runs about 2 hours and 15 minutes and could have used some cutting), "The Way Back" is definitely worth seeing. As a survival story, it is almost by definition richer in character and theme than "127 Hours," one of last year's most acclaimed movies.
Adventure stories can, of course, be purely fictional and still be exciting and even inspirational, but films about extraordinary feats of survival are more compelling if we know they are based on real events. "127 Hours" is a true story. What about "The Way Back?"
Well, it's complicated.
In 1956, a man named Slavomir Rawicz, a Pole living in England, published a remarkable story of survival, "The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom." The book told of seven men escaping from the gulag in 1940 and heading south. They walked through mountains and desert, through blizzards and sandstorms, battling thirst and starvation. Eleven months later, three of them reached India. Rawicz claimed to have been one of the three, although he was never able to prove that, or much of anything else about his supposed trek.
Nonetheless, the story was so powerfully told and so memorably realistic that it became a critical success and a bestseller. Even if "The Long Walk" was not strictly factual, it clearly and grippingly expressed a timely truth about the horrors of Stalinist Russia and the displacement of World War II.
Rawicz died in 2004. Two years later, on the 50th anniversary of the publication of the book, journalists at the BBC launched an intense, in-depth investigation of Rawicz's claims, looking at records in half a dozen countries, including the United States, Poland and Russia.
They discovered that Rawicz had, indeed, been a prisoner in Siberia, but he had not escaped. He had been released in 1942 as part of a general amnesty for Polish soldiers. (The BBC story can be found at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6098218.stm.)
Rawicz had not fled a prison camp in a blizzard and walked from Siberia to India. But it soon appeared that some prisoners had.
In the course of investigating Rawicz's book, the BBC came up with evidence that other Poles, who either escaped from Stalin's concentration camps or were released in the middle of Siberia without transportation, had made similar treks of thousands of miles. The conclusion was that Rawicz had combined his experiences in the gulag with those of other Polish refugees he had met.
After Peter Weir became interested in making a movie of the book, he did some investigating on his own. He, too, found evidence that Poles had walked thousands of miles after escaping or being released from the gulag. He and his associates also discovered that it was not implausible that an American had been among the escapees -- during the Great Depression, the Soviet Union advertised for workers in American newspapers, and thousands of Americans went to Russia and subsequently ended up in Stalin's labor camps.
Weir decided the essential story was true, even if Rawicz had not been present for all of the events in it. For the movie he would call "The Way Back," he gathered a first-rate cast that includes Jim Sturgess as a character loosely based on Rawicz (called Janusz in the movie), Colin Farrell as a Russian professional criminal and Ed Harris as an American communist who had come to Moscow to work and was sent to prison, like many other Americans, on trumped-up charges.
Weir and his excellent regular cinematographer, Russell Boyd, spent months filming in Bulgaria, Morocco and India. The filming is spectacularly believable, as the sub-zero blizzards of Siberia give way to the throat-parching sandstorms of the Gobi desert and eventually to the sweeping, hope-inspiring mountainscapes of the Himalayas. The escapees, who at one point are joined by a young Polish woman fleeing some unnamed horror (Saoirse Ronan), physically deteriorate as they walk, and near the end of the walk Ed Harris in particular looks like a grizzled skeleton.
The ads for "The Way Back" say the movie was "inspired by real events," and that seems fair. What Peter Weir has put on the screen seems both hard to believe and gruelingly real, which is what we rightly expect from a good survival story.
Opens Friday Jan. 21
Harper Barnes,; the author of Never Been A Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked The Civil Rights Movement, is a special contributor to the Beacon.