The Way

I found this movie to be the most over-dramatic, nauseatingly poignant, strange movie ever. With the worst dialogue I've ever heard. 

It's a father/son movie directed and with a screenplay by Emilio Estevez, who plays the dead son, Daniel Avery, who shows up both in the memory and sort of in the present like a friendly ghost. The film stars Estevez's father, Martin Sheen, as his character's father, Thomas Avery. Tom flies to Spain to pick up his son's body when Daniel dies one day into walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. He decides to stay and walk the Camino himself while carrying his son's ashes. At the end, you receive a certificate that you completed the Camino de Santiago. Thomas has them write his son's name on the certificate. Oh the poignancy. Oh the meaning. It overpowers you. It's like the father helped his son finish walking the Camino.

Here are the good things/thing about the movie: it is about the Camino de Santiago, which is a pilgrimage in Spain, which I've been dying to walk ever since Elizabeth Bennett told me about it. It's like walking the Appalachian Trail. Only older, and more Christian. And in Europe. All things I approve of. One of the fellows who shares my mansion wrote her senior thesis on the Camino and walked part of it and interviewed people. She found that contemporary discussions of the Camino tend to downplay the religious aspect. I would like to walk it someday after I get my back functioning properly again.

Before he dies, the son invites the father to walk the Camino with him. The father refuses, because he's too busy being an eye doctor and playing golf. In the end, we see that his father has walked the Camino with him, since the ghost-son shows up calmly at various points. But mostly Thomas walks the Camino with a Dutch man who wants to lose weight (but eats a lot and occasionally does drugs on the trip), a Canadian woman who wants to quit smoking, and a crazy! writer who wants to get over writer's block. As nonreligious as their little group is, they all seem to have some sort of quasi-religious experience by the end.

Just so you can believe me about how bad the dialogue is:

"And after Santiago. Home? Back to the real world?"
Thomas: "If you want to call it that."

Thomas to the ghost of his son: "I came here to bring you home. I don't have anything to take back." (Because he sprinkled his son's ashes all along the Camino. That's right. He sprinkled his son's ashes all along.)
Daniel Avery, the ghost-son: "Yeah you do." (Meaning all of his moving experiences on the Camino.)

Sad father: "He [his son] wanted to see the world."
Sad father's secretary, with a meaningful smile: "And he did."

Son: "You don't choose a life, dad; you live one."