The title refers, literally, to El Camino de Santiago, or the Way of St. James, a Christian pilgrimage route through Spain for the last dozen centuries. But Tom (Martin Sheen) is a widowed California ophthalmologist, not a seeker of spiritual truths. When his priest, offering comfort upon the unexpected death of his son, asks him if he’d like to pray, Tom answers simply “What for?” But he says it in the voice of one who has become embittered, rather than a skeptic.
Tom is not an expressive
man, and he had a complicated relationship with the son. Perhaps it’s in a quest to understand his son’s refusal to settle down that Tom decides to complete the journey his son had begun before falling victim to a sudden storm. Or perhaps it’s simply to honor the dead. The son is played, in brief flashbacks that aren’t overdone, by Sheen’s son Emilio Estevez, who also wrote and directed.
The lightly plotted drama
strikes the familiar notes you expect it to—the journey being more
important than destination, the importance of human connection, the
meaning of loss—but it does
so subtly. Instead of epiphanies, the movie lets its characters,
especially Tom, emerge along the way. I appreciated that Tom remain ornery through much of the movie and quite the opposite of the silver-tongued president he played in The West Wing. As the title suggests, religion and spirituality obviously play a role in the plot, but there is no obvious message. In one scene, Tom and his traveling companions witness a
centuries-old ceremony in a famous church. Only the faces of the four—Tom, a burly Dutchman, a bitter Canadian divorcée, and a prolix Irish writer— betray what they might have made of the whole thing. They don't say anything
afterward. Estevez does not, in other words, force a particular meaning
on the scene. In the end, we don't know how the journey will change the
characters; it is enough that they will always
remember it.
viewed 10/3/11 at Ritz Bourse [PFS screening] and reviewed 10/09/11
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