The Power of Myth at the Movies: The Way
Motion Pictures are a powerful and captivating medium for exploring the mythic, archetypal nature of our experience as human beings. Indeed, I believe cinema to be the preeminent medium for presenting myth in the modern world, a role movies have served since their inception. Sitting in a darkened movie theater, being swept up with others in a powerful narrative projected onto a giant screen is as close I’m likely to get to the primordial experience of listening to a master storyteller sitting around the tribal fire.
Drawing on my love of both film and myth, one of the regular features of Faith in the Journey will be an ongoing series of blog posts about some of my favorite mythic, archetypally-inspired movies. To begin this series, I’ve chosen the 2010 film The Way, directed by Emilio Estevez and staring Martin Sheen. I’ve opted to start with The Way because it resonates very deeply with the theme of “faith in the journey,” the guiding metaphor of this website.
While there are many kinds of journeys of self-exploration one might undertake, the concept of “pilgrimage” is particularly symbolic of the process of spiritual seeking. Unlike other kinds of journeys, pilgrimages are always undertaken for spiritual reasons, with the goal of the journey being the arrival at some place imbued with the presence of the Holy. Of course, as with most kinds of travel, we humans tend to focus on the destination rather than the often-circuitous road that takes us there. Yet, as many pilgrims will attest, the wisdom one hoped to attain at the end of the journey is more likely to be discovered on the road than at the shrine. Perhaps this is because, understood mythically, pilgrimages are as much about a journey within to our deepest selves as it is to some external holy place.
Directly drawing on this the image, The Way concerns a pilgrimage from southern France to the famous shrine of Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, one of the world’s oldest and most venerated of pilgrimage routes. The central character of the film, played by Martin Sheen, is an aging father whose son had accidentally perished in a freak snowstorm walking across the Pyrenees while making the pilgrimage. The father, who had estranged for many years from his son, goes to France to collect his son’s ashes.
There, for reasons he cannot explain, this man who had been equally estranged from his own spiritual longing, spontaneously decides to undertake the arduous 500-mile pilgrimage himself. Initially he tells himself that he is doing it for his son, perhaps as kind of penance for the ways he had judged and withheld approval of his son’s unconventional way of life. He also decides to spread his son’s ashes along the way as a been kind of homage to his son’s spiritual quest.
Deeply grieving, Sheen’s character seeks to walk the “camino” — or “The Way,” as the path to shrine of Santiago is called by pilgrims — alone. It soon becomes clear, however, that this is not to be, as the father unwittingly begins to attract an unlikely assortment of fellow travelers. They include a pot-smoking Dutchman walking the camino to lose weight so his wife will desire him again, an angry Canadian woman escaping from the pain of an abusive relationship, and an Irishman who’d once dreamed of writing a great novel but who now writes trite articles for a travel magazine.
Throughout the first half of the pilgrimage, the distraught father repeatedly tries to chase these fellow travelers away from him. Mired in anger and guilt, the father seeks to isolate himself in his suffering for his failings as father. Much as the father tries to drive them away, however, this quartet of wounded souls find their paths inexplicably and inextricably intertwined. By the end of the film, each of them has found a kind of healing and wisdom they didn’t know about at the start of the journey. Most importantly, much of what they discover along the way they learn from and through each other.
That said, the power that draws these four travelers forward on their journey, the power behind their healing and transformation, remains a mystery to the end. An important clue as the nature of that force, however, is revealed in the guidance of a wise Gypsy man the quartet of pilgrims encounter. When the father confides to the Gypsy that he’s not a religious man, the Gypsy replies that “religion has nothing to do with it.” What this film suggests is that, while organized religion may not be the place to look for the answer to this spiritual mystery, the inherently mythic nature of the pilgrims’ quest is.