"Meandering" is not a particularly devastating criticism for a film about a month-long walk in which people generally are not trying to make time in the first place. And "completely forgettable" is too harsh. Also, I don't think you have to be directly tied to the subject. I wasn't, and I semi-loved the film. Loved it a little. Not a great film, but a good idea with pretty stuff and a nice mood -- and no snark, no privileging of hostility or adversarialism, which is a nice break.
However, some of your other criticisms are at least partly legit. It seems to me that Estevez may have fallen into the difficulty filmmakers have when they try to do an "experience" film, where the idea is that there doesn't have to be much of a "point" or a "story." Film doesn't want to do that. It has a beginning and an end, a first reel and a second one. And internally, this one sets up a specific storyline that puts the Sheen character on the Camino. You can't have that kind of setup, then introduce three other characters with stories of their own, and then just plain refuse to do anything further with those stories. Maybe the point was that the initial reasons became insignificant, but 1) if that was the point, then it needed to be clearer; and 2) that's a cop-out anyway, because all of these people went back to their regular lives after the walk. It's not like their circumstances disappeared just because they did the Camino. So why does it not matter anymore whether Joost's wife thinks he's too fat to sleep with? Why does it not matter that Sarah is going to continue to kill herself with cigs?
The one part of the story that seemed semi-finished was the one involving Jack (which, coincidentally, was the part of the story that started the worst, IMHO -- way too cliched and theatrical, totally bounced off the realistic tracks). Having his mini-breakdown at the church -- which I did not take to signify anything specifically religious, but in context, seemed to refer more to the feeling they all had of being part of something much larger and more ancient than themselves, and wondering about their place in all of it, maybe even wondering about a God whose existence doesn't depend on church structures or hierarchy, or on human expressions of religion -- was at least some kind of resolution for a writer who (I think the film implies this) had gotten in the habit of distancing himself from great locations by writing about them, by objectifying them. Finally the chatter stopped, and he was in the presence of something wordless. That worked a little bit and felt almost like the completion of a storyline.
Anyway...see the response to the other poster later in this thread for more on why I think a somewhat less extreme version of your original post actually is sort of on track.
(I'm posting a good bit of all this in a separate mini-review, btw.)
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