In spite of the controversy surrounding the allegedly fanciful source material, Peter Weir’s new film The Way Back has won largely positive reviews following its release in the UK and America.
The Way Back focuses on a group of internees who contrive to escape from a Soviet forced labour camp during the Second World War.
Ed Harris, Colin Farrell and Jim Sturgess are amongst the stars to have taken roles in the drama. It is Weir’s first film since 2003’s Master and Commander, which was preceded by his Kafkaesque comedy The Truman Show (1998).
The newfilm is based on bestselling book The Long Walk (1979 ) by the late Slavomir Rawicz, one of thousands of Poles deported to far-flung corners of the Soviet Union following the outbreak of war in 1939.
Mr Rawicz portayed himself as the leader of a group that absconded from a Siberian gulag, trekking over 4000 miles to freedom in British India.
The veracity of Rawicz’s account was called into question by experts in recent years. In 2009, further grist was added to the mill when a second veteran named Witold Glinski came forward to declare that it was in fact his odyssey that was recounted in the work.
Nevertheless, it appears that film critics have been won over by the movie, regardless of the background. The Observer described Weir’s creation as ‘riveting’, whilst The Daily Telegraph hailed the film as ‘hugely ambitious, visually magnificent and totally enthralling.’
Not all the critics were smitten. John Meagher of The Independent held that the film’s merits were indeed meager, in spite of the rich source material. He concluded that the film is ‘so bereft of incident and human interest that you end up feeling as if you've walked every step of the 4,000 miles yourself by the time you get to the end of it.”
Meanwhile, over the pond, where the film has had its first run in Los Angeles, The LA Times described the movie as ‘by turns rigorously spare, bracingly direct and then disconcertingly inclined toward an ill-fitting sentimentality.’
Historical Backdrop
Respected historian Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History and wife of Poland’s foreign minister Radek Sikorski, was employed as an advisor on the production, and the evocation of camp life was decribed by The Observer as ‘convincingly recreated.’
The numbers of Poles deported by the Soviets range between 330,000 to 1.2 million. Those interned were mostly figures considered to be a threat to the new communist order, including civil servants, officers, landowners, lawyers, school teachers and doctors, together with their families.
Slawomir Rawicz, along with thousands of other Polish internees, was released during the official amnesty that followed the German invasion of Russia in 1941. Those that were informed of the amnesty generally had to make their own way to the newly created transit camps dotted across the Soviet Union, hence the preponderance of dramatic stories of survival. A large portion of the released men later fought with the Allied Army under General Anders, one of the most high profile Polish officers to survive Soviet incarceration.
Polish viewers will have to wait until April to watch the film on the big screen. The movie will be released under the title Niepokonani (The Invincible). (nh)