As someone on a perpetual two-to-three-year pop culture delay, it’s very rare I see a new film in theatrical release, let alone its first day of theatrical release, let alone a new Australian film on its first day of theatrical release. However, I had this opportunity for Bill Bennett's The Way, My Way (2024).
Bennett's film is also, by coincidence, the second film I’ve seen in as many months about someone making a pilgrimage along the famed Camino trail, the other being Emilio Estevez’s The Way. Both films, intriguingly, foreground their filmmakers in the screen story and provide onscreen surrogates for them: in The Way, Estevez appears briefly as a deceased doctor whose father—the film’s protagonist, played by Estevez’s real-life father Martin Sheen—embarks on the Camino trail to scatter his son’s ashes; in The Way, My Way, adapted from director Bennett’s autobiographical travel writing, Chris Haywood is cast as the filmmaker and follows in his director’s footsteps. On the flip side, the different styles of the films—Estevez’s film overstuffed and leaden with earnestness and self-import, Bennett’s undercooked and breezy—point to some generalizable differences between adult-orientated middlebrow American and Australian films; squint and those differences could be read as either/alternately pros and cons.
Bennett (Haywood) is an Australian filmmaker who becomes enchanted by the idea of walking Camino de Santiago, a pilgrim’s trail across France and Spain. With the begrudging support of his wife (Jennifer Cluff, also Bennett’s offscreen wife), he embarks on this 800+ trek, accompanied by and encountering colourful—albeit thumbnail sketched—fellow wayfarers along the way, frequently portrayed by their real-life, non-professionals counterparts. It’s a novel approach, much like Clint Eastwood casting the real-life heroes of 15:17 to Paris as themselves, and both Bennett and Eastwood savvily underplay it.
I liked Bennett’s Kiss & Kill for its stylistic audacity, and his In a Savage Land for its meat and substance. The Way, My Way contains little stylistic flash and—curiously for a film drawn from its director’s own lived experience—feels lightweight and reveals little character. I say this not to diminish the film’s steady, confident craft—the trail and surrounds are nicely shot by Calum Stewart—nor Chris Haywood’s performance, nor the filmmaker’s lived experience; however, these parts never congeal into a particularly compelling whole.
“Who
will I be when I complete this journey? Let’s find out!” This (paraphrased)
line of voiceover, delivered toward film’s end, would, in a well-crafted piece
of travel writing, have a whiff of conspiratorial rapport with the reader,
capping an intimate relationship between author and reader built over the
preceding pages. In the film, it sounds like lazy and prosaic screenwriting.
Despite Haywood’s thoughtful performance and the rare pleasure of seeing the
veteran character actor centre stage, Bennett as protagonist remains abstract. I
concede this is in part due to The Way, My Way’s quasi-documentary approach and
gentle touch. Nonetheless, it is a case of telling, not showing: the film tells
us he’s changed profoundly through his journey and encounters along the way—most directly in a telephone call to his wife—but struggles to show it.