Poignant, lovely, and even funny at times, this story of a father undertaking the spiritual journey his son died before completing is just wonderful. It's the seventh collaboration between Emilio Estevez (director/writer/supporting) and his father Martin Sheen (starring) and is based in part on selected stories from Off the Road: a Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim's Route by Jack Hitt (the movie's website credits him so I submitted the correction to imdb and it will appear after a while, Hitt's first hit on imdb). The journey is the walk from St. Jean Pied de Port in southwestern France to Santiago de Compostela, which is in the northwest corner of Spain, about 500 miles (I spent a week in Santiago de Compostela in 1997--it's a fascinating medieval city with stone streets and Gaelic music--but didn't learn much about the Pilgrim's Route). The prolific Sheen (born Ramon Estevez) has 226 acting credits, and my favorites include Catch-22 (1970) (I'm showing my age here!), Apocalypse Now (1979), The Dead Zone (1983--one of my top twenty of all time), Wall Street (1987), Da (1988), Bobby (see below), Talk to Me (2007), and, of course, 154 episodes of the West Wing--I watched a couple of seasons but Jack has seen them all multiple times). Here Sheen is a master of manly introversion--recently I heard someone on a screen, big or small, say, "We men can talk about our feelings, we'd just rather not," which sums up Sheen's Tom Avery. Estevez, now 41, has been acting since he was 18 (my faves: The Outsiders (1983), Repo Man (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985)), got his first screenplay produced at 23, and began directing five years later (of his five features I've seen only Bobby (2006), a great ensemble piece about the people at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, the night of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination). We see his Daniel Avery as a ghost who occasionally walks and talks with his father along The Way.
The excellent supporting cast includes Deborah Kara Unger (coincidentally my favorite of her many credits, Crash (1996) (not the 2004 Oscar winner), was directed by David Cronenberg, who directed Sheen in The Dead Zone) as angry Canadian Sarah, Yorick van Wageningen as jovial Dutchman Joost (pronounced yost, rhymes with toast), James Nesbitt (Waking Ned Devine (1998), Millions) as intense Irishman Jack, and Tchéky Karyo (I recognized his name and face but his credits aren't all that familiar to me) as Zen-like Frenchman Captain Henri.
The movie was shot on location on the actual trek and the images are quite lovely. The music by Tyler Bates is pretty, with nice guitar riffs. To hear two tracks, go to this page and select playlist 2 (I also enjoyed hearing the first track on playlist 1: the theme to the Showtime series Californication). Most of his other work has been much more agitated than this, which you'll discover if you listen to the rest of the tracks. In addition there are good songs, listed here.
This is still playing in our town and Jack and I highly recommend it. I have to add that when I heard Tom describe Daniel, in both the trailer and the movie, as "my only son," I thought about messed up Charlie Sheen, and who wouldn't want to distance himself?
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