“The life we live and the life we choose.”

“Pilgrims are poets who create by taking journeys.” -Richard Niebuhr

The Way of Saint James — or, as it is called by the locals, El Camino de Santiago — is a roughly 800-km pilgrimage walk through northern Spain to the city of Santiago de Compostela where, according to pious legend, lie the remains of St. James the Apostle. Pious legend is almost certainly faulty on this point, but nonetheless the Camino has been an important Catholic pilgrimage route for over 1000 years. I myself walked a portion of it — roughly the first 10% — in 2006, and I hope one day to return to complete what I have started.

On the way one finds people with every kind of intention. There are those who are on religious pilgrimage, of course, and in some sense they have pride of place, for they carry on the tradition that is the Camino’s raison d’etre. It is for them that the shrines, churches, prayers, and devotions associated with the Camino make sense. But naturally there are others too: people of other faiths, or none, walking the route for their own reasons.

In the movie, The Way, Martin Sheen plays Tom Avery, an American called to a small town in the Pyrenees to identify the body of his son, Daniel (played by Sheen’s real-life son, Emilio Estevez, who also wrote and directed the film). Daniel had been killed in a sudden storm on (what must have been) the first day of his Camino trek. Tom has never heard of the Camino before, and suspects the walk of being another of his unfocused son’s fruitless enthusiasms, but once finding himself there he decides to walk the Camino himself, scattering his son’s ashes along the route, as a way of honoring his final wishes. Along the way he encounters a number of other pilgrims, has a variety of adventures, and eventually does find his way to the magnificent portals of the Cathedral of St. James in Santiago.  The last act of the film from the arrival in Santiago to the closing credits brings the emotional arc of the film to a satisfying conclusion.

The theme of pilgrimage is a rich one, ripe with possibility. A pilgrimage is, by its nature, a living metaphor for the journey of life itself, and there would seem to be no natural limit to the potential emotional and spiritual scope of a film of this sort.

The Way is content to limit itself to what it is, essentially if unconventionally, a domestic drama of the troubled relationship of a father and a son paired with beautiful scenery and a gallery of minor characters. It is a film of modest ambition, which is fine, and it succeeds, which is even better. I enjoyed it, and I recommend it.

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