Your Way

After Hape Kerkeling made the Camino de Santiago extremely popular and director Coline Serreau also successfully sent a troop of pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela in Saint Jaques...Pilgrimage in French, Martin Sheen now also embarks on the Camino de Santiago, directed by his son Emilio Estevez, to entertain moviegoers in both an emotional and humorous way. While the result is no real revelation, this quiet father-son collaboration is certainly a fine film.

When successful ophthalmologist Tom Avery (Sheen) learns that his son Daniel (Estevez) has died on the Camino de Santiago, Tom's orderly daily life is thrown into mighty disarray. While Daniel could never stay in one place for long and loved to travel the world, his father had never really had the desire to travel far and leave his comfortable comfort zone. But to accompany his late son on his final journey back to the United States, Tom flies to Spain without hesitation. While there to receive Daniel's belongings, he first realizes how little he actually knew his son. In order to perhaps get even closer to him in his death, Tom decides to walk the Camino de Santiago in Daniel's place and scatter his son's ashes at key points. It's a task he actually wants to accomplish on his own. But when he is joined by the somewhat pushy Dutchman Joost (Yorick van Wageningen) and later by the resolute Canadian Sarah (Deborah Kara Unger) and Irishman Jack (James Nesbitt), Tom finds that solitude is not always the best way to cope with grief - even if his new companions sometimes get on his nerves mightily...

Your Way is a quiet tragicomedy that, of course, thrives primarily on the landscape shots along the Camino de Santiago. Estevez and his team have packaged the moving story in images that look pleasingly little like a polished Hollywood production. In addition to the picturesquely captured Camino de Santiago, the film works particularly well whenever the very different characters of the chance acquaintances Tom makes along his way interact with each other. Here the film bristles with charm and restrained wit and hits the viewer right in the heart.

But unfortunately there are always moments in between that drag the whole thing out unnecessarily and are sometimes a little too cramped for demanding depth. Especially at the beginning and during the tough finale this is noticeable rather negatively. But even if this weak point diminishes the positive overall impression a bit, it is maintained in the end solely because of Martin Sheen's strong performance. The transformation that Tom goes through on the Way of St. James and the way he learns to deal with his grief and his feelings of guilt, thanks to the mostly restrained play of the multi-award-winning actor seems authentic and understandable for every viewer. Only in one scene, in which Sheen has to rant drunkenly and give his companions a piece of his mind, does the whole thing seem a bit forced - though this could partly be due to the German dubbing.

Even though Dein Weg eins is an honestly spiritual film, Emilio Estevez skilfully avoids beating an overly intrusive or cautionary religious message into the viewer, which could easily have happened in a film about the Camino de Santiago. By having characters meet who are taking the journey to Santiago de Compostela for very different reasons, and by focusing on their personalities rather than their religious beliefs, the film has a very restrained overall feel. The life-affirming message, which in the end of course does have a lot to do with faith (whether that be a religious or a very personal form of faith), is thus conveyed much more intensely and is readily absorbed even by viewers who may not have much to do with religion.

Despite some lengths and actually unnecessary hangs, Your Way is a very beautiful film, which tells a story with a lot of heart and humor, which is indeed repeatedly permeated by great sadness, but which still leaves the viewer at the end with a smile on his face from the cinema. And exactly for this reason, this journey on the Way of St. James can be recommended to all lovers of sophisticated entertainment films and charming arthouse comedies. Worth seeing

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp