Warning: this article contains SPOILERS for The Way Back
During the press tour for his latest film The Way Back, Ben Affleck hasn't been very cautious about spoiling one of the movie's most important plot points. Affleck, the former Batman star and Oscar-winning director of 2012's Argo, has been experiencing a sort of professional resurgence with the film. Beyond the fact that the sports movie is an overall feel-good production, critics and audiences alike have praised Affleck's performance given its proximity to the actor's own bouts with alcoholism, depression, and divorce.
Directed by Gavin O'Connor, whose previous film The Accountant also starred Affleck, The Way Back follows Affleck's character, a broken man named Jack Cunningham. Though he was a basketball icon in high school, Cunningham's life off the court has been nothing short of a disaster: he quit basketball to spite his father and he blew himself out of a marriage, resorting to a dead-end job in Los Angeles as a construction worker. However, after his former high school calls him and offers him the coaching job for their basketball team, Jack does what he can to build his life back together, one (basketball) shot at a time.
The Way Back works its way through Jack's ups and downs with both his alcoholism and his temper. However, that being said, the biggest obstacle facing the struggling addict is the death of his son – which, the movie reveals, was also the major downfall of his marriage. This fact doesn't present itself until much later in the film and is heavily treated as a revelation to the audience. That hasn't stopped Affleck from mentioning the plotline in interviews, however. For instance, speaking with Variety, here's what Affleck had to say about applying that dire situation to his own life:
“I’m not even comfortable contemplating that [the loss of a child],” he said. “That was the most affecting and difficult part — trying to go to a place where you imagine something as tragic as that. How do you keep going? What do you do? How do you pick yourself up? That’s a real situation that people face — and one that was hard to explore.”
Then again, when breaking down the most iconic characters of his career with GQ, Affleck had this to say about Jack:
"The main source of pain obviously in his life was the death of his son, which I couldn't even imagine what that would be like."
Given that it's the emotional core of the film and the character, it's not super surprising that Ben Affleck, a father of three, would want to talk about those scenes to the press. And it even makes a little bit of sense as to why a reporter would want to ask the actor about those specific moments, given the film's proximity to Affleck's own issues and the plotline's impact on the performance.
But the real problem in this situation is that The Way Back treats the death of Jack's son like a major twist and surprise development when, in reality, it should be included in the expositional scenes of the movie. It's not like the characters aren't aware of what has happened. So, having the actors dance around this important moment and then proceed to drop it on top of the audience's head like an anvil feels more like a cruel, sentimental trick.
