January 19, 2011
IS IT FINALLY SAFE TO BE ANTI-COMMUNIST IN HOLLYWOOD?:
Goodbye, Stalin! (Rex Reed, January 18, 2011, NY Observer)
Painstakingly shot, frame by frame, and with accurate writing and impeccable performances, and guided by the great Australian director Peter Weir's impressive trademark attention to detail, The Way Back saves January from the dumpster and triumphs as the first great film of 2011.This is the inspiring true story of seven desperate prisoners who escaped from a Soviet gulag in Siberia in 1940, during Stalin's infamous "reign of terror," and set out on a punishing journey across 4,500 miles of treacherous terrain through five hostile countries. With few supplies, no medicine and only a pocketful of food, they seemed doomed from the start, but this remarkable film (based on eyewitness accounts and the acclaimed Slavomir Rawicz memoir The Long Walk) is a hymn to their endurance and a chronicle of their journey; it makes you want to cheer. The power of the film is the undeterred passion for freedom shared by this raggedy band of multinationals with nothing else in common. Preferring suicide to slavery and faced with almost certain defeat, they endured hardships and learned how to survive through solidarity, and it is this that forms the nucleus of a film whose indomitable spirit is contagious.
The book is great.