In a bleak prison yard in 1940, a Polish political prisoner named Janusz and a dozen other recently convicted “enemies of the Soviet people” stand freezing, as a commandant tells them about the gulag to which Stalin has sent them, and in which they’re likely to die.
“Understand,” he says. “It’s not our guns or wire or dogs that form your prison. Siberia is your prison — all five million square miles of it.” With a bounty on their heads, and a thousand-mile walk to the nearest border, they can count on nature to be a “merciless jailer.”
Still, dying in Siberian salt mines hardly qualifies as an attractive alternative, so Janusz (Jim Sturgess) and a clutch of mismatched comrades that includes a tight-lipped American expat (Ed Harris), and a thug with Stalin tattooed on his chest (Colin Farrell) begin planning a breakout. Drawing maps in the snow — it’s barely more than guesswork as to where they are or where they need to get — they acknowledge that most of them will die in the attempt. But at least, says Janusz, they’ll die free men.
Call that consolation of a sort as they trek, increasingly famished and exhausted, across frozen tundra, past the Great Wall of China and through the Gobi Desert to the foothills of the Himalayas, only to realize they still have another thousand miles to go.
The Way Back is based on The Long Walk, a bestselling 1950s memoir by Polish veteran Slavomir Rawicz that was thought to be the author’s own story until, shortly after the fall of Polish Communism, records surfaced establishing that Rawicz was actually freed in a 1942 amnesty. Another Polish veteran subsequently claimed that the story was based on his own walk to freedom, but by that time the book’s narrative had been so widely called into question that holding filmmakers accountable for making up events and characters — Farrell’s oddly inked bruiser is apparently an invention — seems pointless.