The Way Back

First Hit: This is a very well done film about redemption.

There are lots of films made about someone redeeming themselves after having a difficult time. Not all of them do it well; this one does.

Here we have a well-crafted storyline that evolves as the character evolves. By slowly revealing the depth of Jack Cunningham’s (Ben Affleck) angst, the audience is interested and wants to know more with each passing frame.

In an early opening scene, we find him in a liquor store buying a box full of beer and hard liquor. It is a holiday, and he’s heading over to his sister’s home. The stop at the store is telling because the store proprietor seems to know him, and the amount he’s purchased is unquestioned.

Cunningham is an alcoholic. He works in construction. After work, he stops by a dive bar where he is well known and makes idle bar talk and jokes with other patrons. On those nights, he’s help home by a fellow customer.

While showering the next morning, he’s got a can of beer in the soap holder, and while the water washes over him, he pounds down another beer before he’s even out of the shower. We see this scene multiple times; it is his habit. We also see him on the job with his ever-present metal coffee mug, which isn’t filled with coffee, but vodka. He drinks on the job.

Jack doesn’t care about much except Angela (Janina Gavankar), his ex-wife, which we discover because he calls and leaves a message on her phone. He also shows enthusiasm when he visits his sister Beth (Michaela Watkins) because he enjoys and appears to love, and care about, her two children.

Outside of these two things, he lives a day to day existence of going to work, going to the bar, and being led home to fall asleep in his clothes. He begins each day with a shower and a beer.

He gets offered a part-time job coaching the local high school team because he was their best player some twenty years prior. Back then, he was so good he was offered a full scholarship to Kansas University but didn’t take it. We learn why, in an intimate conversation with one of his basketball players.

Watching Jack decide to try this coaching job was another great scene. He downs at least two six-packs of beer while holding his phone next to his ear, practicing his speeches as to why he can’t take the coaching job. Outstanding scene.

It’s little scenes like this that make this film work well. Another such scene is Jack’s lunch with Angelea and their subsequent joint attendance to a friend’s son’s birthday party. Powerful scenes that open the door to the story a little bit farther.

The basketball scenes are some of the best I’ve seen shot for a film because they were very realistic to high school basketball. The movie gets it right with the noise of the gym, the anxious players, and the boys' willingness to buy into someone that knows basketball. Jack knows how to motivate them, as he motivates himself into caring about something more than his loss.

Affleck is amazing. His performance, by far, is the best acting by a man this year. Because of his very own public battle with alcohol, he makes this character real. He shows us that we know that he knows what it is like to carry the demons of addiction around. Gavankar is terrific as his former wife, who wants to move on with her life. She shows equanimity in both loving her former husband and reviling his behavior as an alcoholic. Watkins is superb as Cunningham’s sister. Her wistful ways of sharing her wish for her brother to seek help, are spot-on. The boys on the basketball team were outstanding. Brad Ingelsby wrote a dynamic screenplay that takes us on a road of discovery. Gavin O’Connor showed great and deft skills by giving the audience the right amount of information in each new scene to let the audience engage in this story as it unfolds.

Overall: This film shows how a film can be crafted by someone who cares about the story they want to tell.

Blindspotting

First Hit: Extremely powerful and pointed film and raises the bar for Best Picture of the Year.

Opening the film, is a sequence of short video shots of Oakland. Among the short montage of clips are the Fox Theater, Oakland homes, jump roping, Whole Foods, and a shoving match between two women on BART. Each of these are perfectly brief and set the stage for the racially tense film to come.

Collin (Daveed Diggs) is living in a probation facility and he’s got just a few days to go before he’s free. He came out of Santa Rita prison for something, we find out later, was a horrible fight outside a bar.

He’s working for a moving company with his lifelong friend and troublemaker Miles (Rafael Casal). Miles has a hair trigger and lashes out from time to time. As a racially mixed friendship, they have each other’s back and have had their fair share of run-ins together.

One of the early opening scenes, they are sitting in a very tricked out car, smoking weed, while Collin laments that he’s only few days away from being free of his court mandated probation. When Miles finds a pistol between the seats he brandishes it about, Collin gets upset and asks Miles to keep it away from him.

What does Miles do? He finds more guns in the car, playfully holds them up, and buys one. Collin, although upset, just asks Miles to not let me see or know that he has the gun on him while they work or hang out together. The way this scene unfolds is both pointed and funny.

Miles lives with Ashley (Jasmine Cephas Jones) and they have a son Sean (Ziggy Baitinger). Collin picks Miles up for work the moving truck. Because Collin is on probation he uses the truck to get home and to work. Arriving at the moving company's office to punch the time-clock, you can tell that Collin and Val (Janina Gavankar), the front desk receptionist and dispatcher, have some history together. It is obvious that she’s called off the relationship by the way they interact.

After dropping Miles off at home one night, Collin is waiting for the light to turn green when all of a sudden, a black man appears in front of his truck, looks at Collin, and continues to run. An Oakland policeman soon follows and when the policeman is adjacent to the truck’s door, he fires four shots and kills the running man. The policeman turns and looks directly at Collin.

This scene and image haunts Collin throughout the film. From this point on, the ominous tone of guns, racially charged words, social-economic and cultural differences begin to shape this film. The gun Miles owns plays a prominent role in two incredibly powerful scenes, as does their friendship and how it is tested. Collin wants to clean up his act, but racial tensions that build in the community because of the shooting, the have and have nots, and what he's going to do next once he's off probation makes his path difficult to master.

The term "Blindspotting" is explained in a very moving scene with Val and Collin and it’s usage is one I will not forget as it points out something we all do.

Diggs is sublime. The range of emotions and actions he shows as Collin are engaging and powerful. Casal as Miles was amazing. He’s powerfully rowdy but when Ashley reaches out to him about a particular incident, his compassion and love is amazingly evident. Gavankar is wonderful as Collin’s former girlfriend and truck dispatcher. She holds true to her beliefs and is a powerful force in Collin’s life. Jones was wildly wonderful. Her clarity of boundaries was perfectly expressed. Baitinger was great as Miles and Ashley's young boy. Ethan Embry as the Oakland Police Officer who shoots the running black man is incredibly engaging in both his scenes; the shooting and in his confrontation with Collin. Tisha Campbell-Martin as Mama Liz, Collin’s mother, is a scene stealer. Casal and Diggs wrote this insightful engagingly powerful script. Carlos Lopez Estrada directed this story with amazingly deft hands. He totally captured the feel of this powerful story.

Overall: Because this film is so powerful it must be considered one of my favorites as film of the year.