5/10
What's your idea of a good walk? A mile? 4 miles? Perhaps 15 miles is what makes you feel good. How about 4000 miles? This is the distance travelled on foot by half a dozen people escaping from one of Stalin's gulag's in 1941. Apparently. This is the film of that story.
Peter Weir has not made a film since Master And Commander (a favourite of mine) seven years ago, so a new film from him is welcome, even if this doesn't count among his very best. Janus (Jim Sturgess) is a Polish soldier falsely accused, tortured and imprisoned along with hundreds of thousands of others as part of Stalin's war of terror. He finds some other inmates keen to escape, including Ed Harris as an American called Mr Smith, Colin Farrell as a Russian criminal, and a few other men. Along the way they are joined by Irena (Saoirse Ronan), a young woman also trying to to escape. The long trek starts in Northern Siberia, and the original intention is to head for Mongolia, but when they arrive and find that that country too is Communist and in cahoots with Stalin, it's next stop India via Tibet. Just to clarify, this is not Sir Ranulph Fiennes, this is half a dozen malnourished people with no food, no water and no means of protecting themselves from the weather (which includes extremes of snow, heat and sand).
So the first question has to be asked, can we believe this story? It was told to an author in 1956 by a man called Slavomir Rawicz, who claimed it happened to him. However subsequent Soviet records suggest that he was released in 1942, and therefore, his story could not be true. Another Polish man more recently claimed that he told Rawicz the story, who then took it as his own. But we're still faced with the sheer improbability of such a journey, however much we might want it to be accurate. Imagine The Incredible Journey mated with The Great Escape, and you have only a fraction of what we're expected to swallow. Which would matter less, if it wasn't being presented as a true story. If there is any doubt about the credibility of what we're being shown, it undermines our sense of commitment to the outcome.
It seems as if Weir has bought the tale hook, line and sinker, and to be fair, he makes a good effort at creating plausibility out of the extraordinary events. The scenes at the Gulag, and the subsequent escape through the forest with a disparate bunch who have little in common, is told well, and filmed beautifully. Sturgess makes a surprisingly sturdy central character, full of initiative, with outdoor skills that would win him lots of Duke of Edinburgh badges. But the longer the film goes on - and it does go on - the more my enthusiasm was tested. After the snowy forests comes the burning desert, and then the rocky mountains, and after a while, I felt I'd seen enough. They have no food for what seems like weeks at a time, and rarely much in the way of water, but they never look anywhere near emaciated. True, it's hard for actors (unless they're Christian Bale) to look authentically haggard, but it does lessen the sense that we are watching true suffering. The other problem is that since we are told at the beginning that the walk was completed, there's never any real sense of tension. And by the end of the film, Weir obviously realises that the audience's capacity for watching the walkers walk has been stretched beyond its natural limits, so that the Himalayas are crossed in a matter of seconds, when they would surelyhave been the hardest part of the journey. A final complaint. The very end of the film is a complete fudge, both dishonest and inauthetntic, and left me wondering quite what it was I'd been shown.
Having said all this, it's not at all a bad film. As I said, it looks beautiful, has a strong cast, and contains a good deal of engrossing drama. But by the high standards set by Peter Weir in his previous films, this falls somewhat short.
