By Gary Topping–
When I first started watching The Way, the 2010 movie produced and directed by Emilio Estevez and starring, among others, himself and his father Martin Sheen, I expected that it was going to be a Catholic movie. Sheen is, after all, very well-known as a Catholic, and the movie is a story of a group of pilgrims on the 500-mile Camino de Santiago across northern Spain, a classic pilgrimage route since the early Middle Ages.
Before long, though, I began to have my doubts. Sheen’s character, Tom Avery, is a California ophthalmologist who journeys to France to pick up the ashes of his estranged son Daniel (Estevez) who has been killed in the Pyrenees in an early stage of the Camino. In a gesture of posthumous reconciliation, he impulsively decides to undertake the pilgrimage himself to deliver the ashes to the great church of St. James, the goal of the pilgrimage. Although he incidentally identifies himself at a later point as a casual, twice-a-year Catholic, his motives are anything but religious.
Nor are those of the other motley characters he takes up with in this Wizard of Oz-type journey. Sarah Sinclair (Debora Kara Unger) hopes the pilgrimage will help her quit smoking; Joost (Yorick van Wageningen), a portly Dutchman (“If it ain’t Dutch, it ain’t much.”) is trying to lose weight; and Jack Stanton (James Nesbitt) is an Irish writer trying to overcome writer’s block. Jack is presumably a Catholic, but an embittered one, who points out that in Ireland “the church has a lot to answer for.” Not much Catholic stuff going on here.
In the end, though, I came to the conclusion that it is indeed a Catholic movie, but in subtle ways that force the viewer to reconsider what truly human values are, and they don’t much involve going on a pilgrimage or even going to church. The only unsubtle resolution comes when Jack enters the great cathedral and suddenly, in a profoundly emotional moment, realizes that the Church really does have something for him, and he crawls on his knees, as pilgrims are supposed to do, to approach the tomb of St. James. Sarah does not quit smoking, and Joost does not lose weight, both of them apparently coming to the conclusion that their goals were too narrow, too self-centered, to be worthy of the pilgrimage. And Tom? He does achieve his goal of bringing Daniel’s ashes, not only to Santiago de Compostela, but indeed to Finisterre, “Land’s End,” in the ocean some miles west of the city. But I’m still thinking about how the journey transformed him at a profounder level, and I’ll also leave you to wrestle with that on your own.
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles.
