Worth: $13.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Chris Haywood, Pia Thunderbolt, Laura Lakshmi, Jennifer Cluff
Intro:
… even if it touches on a lot of familiar ideas, the overall depiction of mindfulness and the exertion that goes into becoming humbled hits the right notes to ring true.
When asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest, mountaineer George Mallory famously responded “Because it’s there”. While there are all manner of subsequent reflections and perspectives one can have on why people do such things, it all begins with the first step. And often, that first step is simply asking oneself “Why not?”
The Way, My Way, the latest feature from veteran Aussie filmmaker Bill Bennett (Kiss or Kill), is a work of docufiction based on his memoir of the same name. It details his own geographical endeavour to make the 800km trek along the Camino de Santiago (or The Way of St. James, en Inglés), a historic Christian pilgrimage walk. While Chris Haywood portrays Bill himself in front of the camera, and Pia Thunderbolt and Laura Lakshmi act as two fellow pilgrims that Bill encounters along the way, everyone else is playing themselves, from all the other pilgrims making the journey, to Bill’s wife Jennifer Cluff playing herself (and being all kinds of fun to watch in the process).
It’s clearly a labour of love for Bill Bennett, squeezing beautiful vistas out of the Spanish countryside while maintaining the story’s intimate framing. Haywood plays Bill as the kind of curmudgeon that would typically be the centerpiece of this kind of ex-pat grey pound (silver kanga?) comedy-drama, getting hearty chuckles out of how surly he can be (the running gag about Bill trying to get good photos in particular).
The way that the film explores how this kind of trek (beyond just mainly having your own thoughts as your sole companion) can affect your perception of life before and after the journey makes for interesting food for thought… but nothing all that revelatory. It’s the standard adventure cliché of the journey and what is learnt being more important than the destination; Bill’s own reasoning for making that journey manages to fall short because there’s even less of a tangible explanation for it, and partly because the rushed attempt to create one at the end isn’t terribly convincing.
If this were purely a documentary, even one involving dramatic re-enactments, that gap could still be traversed for the sake of telling the facts. But since this is somewhat dramatised, it not only draws attention to the lack of thematic connective tissue from scene-to-scene (Bill just… becomes less of a boofhead when the script needs him to), but it also makes the inclusion of the real-life pilgrims within the production seem a bit off.
Their candour about lives pre-pilgrimage and their own reasons for taking it can feel ever so slightly exploitative, as if Bill needed to include other people’s actual trauma in order to justify the larger ‘story’ being told. Again, if this were a pure documentary, this still could’ve worked, but as a scripted drama ostensibly about his story, something just doesn’t sit right.
Even with that niggle, though, The Way, My Way is still ok. Its philosophical tidbits combined with the consistent hit-to-miss ratio for jokes keep things entertaining throughout, Chris Haywood’s lead performance is as bright as his Swannies cap, and even if it touches on a lot of familiar ideas, the overall depiction of mindfulness and the exertion that goes into becoming humbled hits the right notes to ring true.
