nice mood, nice tone, good film...

...affected a little bit negatively by the occasional bad note and by what ultimately may be a mismatch of medium and anti-message.

To be clear, I did mostly love this film. It's flawed, but its heart is in the right place; it's trying to say something important, in an age of Tarantino (hey, I watch his stuff too) and self-involved adolescent garbage. Lots of beautiful scenery, pace unhurried as the actual Camino is, nice human tone to the thing, no snark, no pessimistic hostility or adversarialism. Absolutely worth it, IMHO, especially for people in a pensive mood about life and meaning.

But just to point out the kind of flaws you might want to be ready for:

(SPOILERS FOLLOW.)

1. One example of a bad note: The appearance of James Nesbitt (who I really love as an actor -- see Bloody Sunday today, I mean really today, if you haven't already seen it) as a yammering Irish writer. The scene comes off as theatrical and unreal. You can have theater in a movie, if that's what you've set up. Most older films are this way start to finish, for instance. Artificial manner and language are OK if it's well-done artifice and if it's consistent. But this film sets up an air of realism (as it should for the story, I think), and then has this overwritten introductory scene with Jack (the overwrittenness of the character drops away a bit as we go, thankfully). Really a false note, IMHO.

2. Another example: Estevez' mere appearance (as the dead son) to Tom at some points in the film seemed heavy-handed to me. What did it add? If you're going to do magical realism, do it with something more than the mere appearance of the dead son, just standing there exchanging knowing glances and nods with Dad. The scene at the end, with Estevez helping the monks swing the incense at the cathedral, was almost comical. Would he really be doing this while looking at the camera in a POV shot meant to show Tom's POV, and doing another one of those knowing mini-nods? Why? Seems to me a better kind of shot, if you have to have very specific visions of the son at all, would be for Tom to see him far off in the distance on the Camino with no awareness that the father is looking. Every parent goes through that period of finally seeing the child as a separate person, not as an adjunct of themselves, which would've been a nice furthering of the story elements introduced at the beginning of the film. Or, you could just not show the son at all. When you try to do these visions in film, it usually comes off as too literal and heavy-handed, because film is literalistic by its very nature. You point the camera, it shoots the pictures. And what it shoots (here, anyway) is not a spirit, it's not the son in the afterlife, it's not even Dad's imagination. It's a flesh-and-blood human. Posing it as something else is working against the very image you're putting up there. It's too big a task here, as it usually is elsewhere.

3. Another commenter referred to the film as "meandering" and "pointless." I'll reproduce here what I said on his thread ("Decently acted, but pointless").

First of all, "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.

However, some of that poster's 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.

Now, maybe the idea was that their initial reasons for going on the walk 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 would have gone 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 anymore that Sarah is going to continue to kill herself with cigs? What changed? What was the Camino about? If it's about the unconditional love of Christ for flawed humanity (which I strongly believe in myself), okay -- but that love transforms people. What was the transformation?

And for Tom, what was the epiphany, if there was one? Simply that he completed what his son had started? That he stopped being so sullen and self-focused toward other people? I don't mean the screenplay should offer some reductionistic, neatly-packaged "meaning." In fact, I hate films that do that, because as soon as they do the thing stops bearing any relationship to actual life outside the running time of the film. But in the process of reaching a larger and ineffable meaning, it wouldn't have hurt to have maybe a bit more indication of what the walk did for the father.

Similarly, what does "it was never about these [the cigarettes]" mean? I suspect that's not an uncommon experience; it's not that it came off as unreal; but what did Estevez and source novelist Jack Hitt (if the line was in the novel) think of this? What did they think it was supposed to mean? I do think the film is a bit too much of a blank canvas in this way. One big reason why people watch a film is to experience a story and a way of thinking that somebody else has, and that shouldn't remain a complete mystery through to the end of the film.

The one part of the story that seemed sort of finished in a nicely non-reductionistic way was the one involving Jack (which, again, was the part of the story that started the worst, IMHO). 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 the characters were generally having at that point, a feeling that seemed to me to be about a sense 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 cathedrals, church hierarchy, or on human expressions of religion, and yet is expressed in these amazing ways in how human culture reaches toward God -- 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 stops, he is in the presence of something wordless and unimaginably vast and ancient, and it overwhelms him a little. Nothing more is said about it. That worked a little bit and felt almost like the completion of a storyline. But this sort of nicely inexact closing of the circle, or at least close to it, was missing in the other storylines.

Also: "Pointless" may be at least partly beside the point as a criticism, too. I'd be a little surprised if Estevez hadn't done some reading in Zen and/or the Christian mystics, and it's possible that the "simply being, simply walking" aspect of the story was deliberate. If so, then it was not "pointless," except to the extent that trying to use film to make a point about pointlessness, or emptiness, or whatever word one uses to describe the simple "draw water, carry wood" thing, is not something film really wants to do. Film wants to tell a story, and this particular film even set up several storylines. If it can be accused of anything, it's not pointlessness per se, but rather 1) waffling on whether or not there should be a "point" in the sense of stories that come to something, and 2) using the wrong medium to do it, if a depiction of "pointlessness" or "emptiness" or "mere being" _was_ the point.

Yeah, this sort of thing gets hard to talk about in language. Which is sort of my own point. Film is a physical thing that has a beginning and end that you can literally point to as a specific physical reality, that exists in a specific running time with specific images. It's specific and point-filled by its very nature, IMHO.

Again, though, none of this came even close to "ruining" the film at all. I actually loved the atmosphere, the scenery, the idea of the thing, the mood. For me, those are very big aspects of any film's success, and in a way the film was a little like the walk, in that the point of it is the experience of it, maybe not so much a specific meaning that is able to be articulated in language. If you're not too demanding about storylines playing out in completely plotted and finished ways, if you can just sort of drink in the experience (maybe a couple of glasses of good wine would help with this, or maybe it's just that I'm always up for that), you'll probably love this film at least a little bit.