The trick when watching drunks on the big screen is to check out the eyes. Affleck has the beady-eyed puffy squint down pat, but you can tell he's an actor drawing on past memory rather than an active drunk. For one thing, his eyes just aren't watery enough - fans of watching a drunk pretend he's not really should check out Jon Hamm in (the extremely forgettable) Keeping Up with the Joneses, in which he plays someone who doesn't take a drink throughout the entire film but most definitely looks like he's on the sauce.
While he looks the part with his slump shouldered stance, the decision to keep the actual drunk acting here to a minimum is a smart one because Affleck's physical drunk acting isn't up to much. He stumbles, he staggers, but it's all pretty pro forma: there's nothing here that comes close to the scene in Bad Santa where Billy Bob Thornton is gradually revealed coming up an escalator and every fiber of his being screams "I am so wasted". Affleck looks like a heavy drinker, but he doesn't move like one.
What Affleck does get right - and presumably he's the one getting it right because the script doesn't call for it - is a vague sense of explosive menace. Being around a drunk isn't a whole lot of fun because you're never quite sure what's going to set them off or what they're going to do once they've been set off. Affleck taps into that, but only briefly: there's a moment early on where he slaps a beer car across the room and nobody really bats an eye, but it's pretty much the only moment where his boozing feels really felt.
Obviously he can't really be a dangerous drunk because this is a heartwarming movie about him coaching teenagers; nobody's going to stick around if he starts slapping the kids. There's even a scene towards the end where he's blind drunk and being threatened by an aggressive stranger and he goes out of his (drunken) way to defuse the situation. He's a drunk who's only a danger to himself, and even then only because drinking messes up his sense of direction.
Reportedly the can slapping moment was improvised by Affleck, and the more you think about it the more out of character it is for him - despite being one of the few deeply felt moments here. That's because the script really has nothing to say about drinking beyond the standard "he's drinking to dull the pain". The more backstory we get, the less interesting and more easily explained his drinking becomes, until it ends up as a simple equation where pain = drinking.
Affleck's presence here is the big selling point and he does give a powerful performance, but his presense also distorts the story. The Way Back is a straightforward and relatively heartwarming tale of a man who's lost but finds redemption in coaching a group of plucky youngsters who help him reconnect to the only meaningful thing in his life (sports). Being drunk is just a plot device and the film has nothing at all to say about it; if being addicted to anything else was remotely family friendly, this film would work exactly as well with him hooked on crack or sex or an insane amount of exercise.
Worse, this doesn't even deliver on what it promises. No doubt Affleck's experiences of hitting the bottle shaped his (again, strong) performance, but the script doesn't allow him to express anything particularly new or insightful about alcohol addiction. All that he manages to get across is that when he's on the sauce he's not having a great time. Hopefully he had a plucky bunch of thinly sketched basketball-loving teens to inspire him to get off the booze too.
- Anthony Morris
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