The long march

Peter Weir’s The Way Back tells the story of a group of escapees from a 1940 Siberian gulag who walked across Siberia, Mongolia, Tibet and the Himalayas to freedom in British India, a journey of 12 months and 4,000 miles, and a journey that will bring into sharp focus the domitability of your own crappy spirit, particularly if you always take the bus two stops up the hill, as I do.

Peter Weir’s The Way Back tells the story of a group of escapees from a 1940 Siberian gulag who walked across Siberia, Mongolia, Tibet and the Himalayas to freedom in British India, a journey of 12 months and 4,000 miles, and a journey that will bring into sharp focus the domitability of your own crappy spirit, particularly if you always take the bus two stops up the hill, as I do. This is a vast epic and a sweeping epic and, by turns, both a harrowing and triumphant epic, but it never seemed that true. I went with it, sure enough. I went with it through the ferociously cold frozen forests and the scorching torment of the Gobi desert — never again, I’m telling you — but could never quite believe it. Peter Weir is a masterful director, but I wonder: did he?

The starting point for this film was the 1956 bestselling memoir by Slavomir Rawicz, a Polish army lieutenant who recounted the above story as his own but was discredited by a BBC investigation in 2006, after Weir had already started working on the script. However, it’s not entirely fictional as another Pole, Witold Glinski, then came forward to say it did happen to him, and Rawicz had appropriated his story. Weir now says the film was ‘inspired’ by Rawicz’s book, but the truth/fiction blur is a bugger.