As I mentioned yesterday, I have been stuck indoors with a cold. I thought it best to hunker down on the couch and watch the second half of Saturday night’s Spurs/Pelicans game (yay!) and then a bunch
of movies.
I decided to focus on basketball flicks and add on to the “basketball movie of the week.”
I watched The Way Back, starring Ben Affleck as a former high school basketball star who returns to his alma mater to coach.
When we meet Jack Cunningham (portrayed by Affleck), he is in the thick of alcoholism. Separated from his wife, he works a construction job by day and spends his evenings at the local bar.
He gets a call from Father Devine at his former Catholic high school, Bishop Hayes asking him to fill in for the coach who recently suffered a heart attack.
He joins the team and sees that their glory days are behind them. The roster is limited to handful a of students as enrollment has decreased over the years. He makes changes to the line up, grows a relationship with the squad’s best player, and leads the team to some victories.
Cunningham initially adjusts his drinking as he becomes vested in the team. It is later revealed that he and his wife lost their son to cancer. When he attends a birthday party, he is taken back to the emotional state that drove him to drink. It is exacerbated in a later scene when his friend’s child gets some bad news regarding his cancer status.
It drives Cunningham into a bender. The following day, he arrives for work still drunk and loses his job.
After another night of drinking where he crashes into a parked car before accidentally breaking into a house thinking he was meeting up with a date, he signs himself into rehab.
The film ends with the team in the playoffs being coached by their assistant. Cunningham is later seen shooting baskets alone on an outdoor court.
The film was more about Cunningham’s life and less about the sport of basketball. His relationships with the players and coaches are limited in comparison to other sports films like Rez Ball. It’s a good story, but not as much about the players and the game as most.
Affleck is solid and the supporting cast work well, but it does feel as if it was edited in a way that jumps from one event to another without a feel for the timeline. It also took me a minute to realize the film took place in California as they used more unconventional areas not as common to Hollywood films.
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