Find­ing the Way Back

It’s been a rough few years for Ben Affleck. After his bril­liant turn as sneaky hus­band Nick Dunne in David Fincher’s Gone Girl, he should have been rid­ing high on a sea of crit­i­cal acclaim, but instead the past six years have brought only mis­er­able box office bombs, damn­ing evi­dence of sex­u­al mis­con­duct, and memes. Lots of memes. Hol­ly­wood nev­er keeps a good straight white man down though, and while The New York­er pon­dered The Great Sad­ness of Ben Affleck, he was nev­er real­ly out for the count.

In a can­ny move on his part, Affleck has chan­nelled some of his inter­nal angst into Gavin O’Connor’s Find­ing the Way Back, a sports dra­ma that cen­tres on a once-prodi­gious bas­ket­ball play­er, who in mid­dle age has found him­self divorced, bare­ly employed, and bat­tling alco­hol addic­tion after suf­fer­ing a fam­i­ly tragedy. When the film was released in the US, a well-timed New York Times pro­file of Affleck detailed the per­son­al aspects of the film, empha­sis­ing how much of him­self had gone into the role of Jack Cun­ning­ham, and that he drew on his own expe­ri­ence of alco­holism and reha­bil­i­ta­tion to bring authen­tic­i­ty to the character.

Cer­tain­ly Affleck’s per­for­mance here feels a mil­lion miles away from the mono­syl­lab­ic gri­mac­ing of his stint as Bat­man; there’s a sense of self-loathing and dis­gust that runs deep with­in Cun­ning­ham, and as a blue-col­lar work­er with no out­let for his com­plex emo­tions and long-last­ing trau­ma, he strug­gles to see a way out of the lifestyle he’s fall­en into.

He’s asked to take on a bas­ket­ball coach­ing job at his for­mer high school, where ghosts of his glo­ri­ous past linger, and he reluc­tant­ly agrees, though it’s hard to rec­on­cile his new­found pas­sion with his ill­ness, and in ignor­ing, sup­press­ing or flat-out or deny­ing it, Cun­ning­ham only spi­rals deep­er into despair. It’s an authen­tic, unglam­orous por­tray­al of a sub­stance abuse prob­lem fre­quent­ly nor­malised in soci­ety and art, and there’s not an inch of van­i­ty in Affleck’s per­for­mance – he’s com­pelling to watch, per­haps even more so know­ing that there’s some truth in it all.

It’s a shame that this com­mit­ted and sur­pris­ing­ly hon­est turn from Affleck is let down by a for­mu­la­ic script, which sees Cun­ning­ham try to instil a work eth­ic into a scrap­py band of high school bas­ket­ball play­ers who are indif­fer­ent to his pres­ence. It’s a sto­ry we’ve heard before in the likes of The Bad News Bears and A League of Their Own: ​‘I’m teach­ing the kids, but real­ly the kids are teach­ing me’.

While Find­ing the Way Back does attempt to dis­pel the cin­e­mat­ic myth that years of trau­ma can be undone in a mat­ter of months, it still does so with a heavy dose of schmaltz. Still, it’s worth it for Affleck, and hope­ful­ly going for­ward, he’ll trade Hol­ly­wood slick­ness for some­thing a lit­tle more authentic.