“The Way Back,” a new drama starring Ben Affleck, is a riff on the you-can-never-go-home-again story with a sports twist.
Affleck is Jack Cunningham, a former high school basketball phenom who left a full scholarship at the University of Kansas on the table as he walked away from a promising career and into years of addiction. “I spent a lot of time hurting myself,” he says. “I made a lot of bad decisions. I got a lot of regrets.”
Cut to years later. Jack’s drinking—he starts the day with a beer in the shower—has cost him everything but when his alma mater recruits him to coach their basketball team he reluctantly agrees. “Is the team any good? he asks. “No,” he’s told. “In fact, the last time they made the playoffs, you were still playing.”
The team is in tatters, a laughing stock in the league but being back on the court gives Jack a renewed sense of being. “It keeps me busy,” he says. “Keeps my mind off other things.” As he molds the ragtag team into a force to be reckoned with, he discovers that the inspirational lessons he is teaching the kids—”The players decide the game!”—apply to his life as well.
“The Way Back” has the form of many other sports flicks—a new coach helps a failing team find their mojo—but this one digs deeper to focus on the characters rather than the rah rah of the sports. It’s “The Days of Wine and Rose” with basketball and a bleary eyed, beer-bellied and vulnerable Affleck at the center.
A quiet movie that tells the story of a man living in quiet desperation, “The Way Back” benefits greatly from Affleck’s raw but understated performance. Jack is damaged goods, a man wounded by life who subverts his pain by staring at the bottom of a pint glass. Director Gavin O’Connor gives Affleck nowhere to hide, shooting up-close-and-personal, and you can practically smell the beer breath as he shouts instructions at his players from the sidelines.
Rebuilding his life doesn’t come easily for Jack and the lack of easy life hacks, and a great central performance, elevates “The Way Back” above the run-of-the-mill sports drama.
Ben Affleck plays the title role in the thriller The Accountant. “Like, a CPA accountant?” asks a Treasury Department worker. “Not quite,” replies agent Ray King (J. K. Simmons) in what might be the understatement of the year.
Affleck is a pocket-protector-wearing forensic accountant who “risks his life cooking the books for some of the scariest people on the planet; drug cartels, arms brokers, money launderers, assassins.” An autistic math genius with a violent side, he survives his dangerous world through dual facilities for math and mayhem.
“He’s a very distinct and unusual character,” Affleck told Entertainment Weekly. “A little bit different than your average, everyday person in the way he processes information and social thinking, and the way he sees numbers and logic, and that he’s trapped a little bit in his own mind.”
Affleck joins a long list of actors who have looked for loopholes, legal, financial and otherwise, on the big screen.
The late, great Gene Wilder became a star playing bookkeeper Leo Bloom in The Producers. “I spend my life counting other people’s money. People I’m smarter than.” It’s Bloom who comes up with the get rich quick scheme to mount a terrible Broadway musical and make off with the investor’s cash when the show flops. His plan falls apart when Springtime for Hitler becomes a hit but his business partner still has good things to say. “You’re an accountant,” raves Max Bialystock. “You’re in a noble profession! The word ‘count’ is part of your title!”
Rick Moranis played Louis Tully, an accountant possessed by an ancient spirit in Ghostbusters. Before he goes all supernatural Louis throws a bash to celebrate his fourth anniversary as an auditor at his swanky Central Park West apartment. “I’m givin’ this whole thing as a promotional expense,” he says, “that’s why I invited clients instead of friends.” The scene was shot in one continuous take with Moranis making his way through the party, improvising perfectly nerdy CPA dialogue—“This is real smoked salmon from Nova Scotia, Canada, $24.95 a pound! It only cost me $14.12 after tax, though.”—throughout.
In The Untouchables Charles Martin Smith plays Oscar Wallace, the bespectacled book balancer who puts together the tax evasion case against notorious mobster Al Capone. The character was largely based on Frank Wilson, the IRS Criminal Investigator who spent years keeping tabs on Capone’s financial dealings before laying charges. A self-penned article on his exploits, He Trapped Capone, inspired the 1949 Glenn Ford film The Undercover Man.
Cher initially turned down the Oscar winning role of Loretta Castorini, the widowed accountant in Moonstruck who falls for a one-handed baker. Though exhausted from one of the busiest years of her career, she ultimately took the part, showing up on set just one day after wrapping The Witches of Eastwick. When Moonstruck was done she took a week off before shooting the courtroom drama Suspect. The singer-turned-actress later called making the film, “too silly, too much fun to be work,” and became only the second female performer, alongside Barbra Streisand, to have a #1 hit and an Oscar.
Bloom, Tully, Wallace and Castorini are reel life bookkeepers, but in real life several actors almost chose figures over fame. Bob Newhart worked the ledger books for United States Gypsum and Eddie Izzard studied accountancy at the University of Sheffield.
In “The Accountant” Ben Affleck plays a pocket-protector-wearing forensic bookkeeper who “risks his life cooking the books for some of the scariest people on the planet; drug cartels, arms brokers, money launderers, assassins.” An autistic math genius with a violent side, he survives his dangerous world through dual facilities for math and mayhem.
Affleck is Christian Wolff. By day he’s a small town strip mall CPA, but when the sun goes down his darker side emerges. Working for the worst of the worst he erases money trails and helps bad guys and gals launder money.
Although Christian has trouble relating to people there are several folks who would dearly like to meet him. First is the soon-to-be retired Treasury agent Director Raymond King (J.K. Simmons)—“I was old ten years ago,” he says.”—who assigns financial analyst (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) to the case. “He’s like, a CPA accountant?” she asks. “Not quite,” replies agent Ray King (J. K. Simmons) in what might be the understatement of the year.
Just as worrisome, but infinitely deadlier is Braxton (Jon Bernthal), a hitman hired by a robotics company to eliminate Christian and researcher Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick) after they exposed the company’s fraud.
Luckily Christian (or whichever alias he’s using today) is part James Bond, part John Nash. A deadly mix of tactician and mathematician, he balances the books by offing some bad guys. “How does he do that?” asks Braxton. “Hit them over the head with an adding machine?”
There are twists and turns aplenty in “The Accountant” but at its heart the movie is a character study. Affleck, never a particularly animated actor, excels in a role that requires him to stay an arm’s length from people—unless he’s engaged in up-close-and-personal face-to-face combat. He is the film’s core, the center from which everything else revolves.
Sadly everyone else is underused, including Kendrick, Simmons, Lithgow and Tambor. It’s a stellar and seasoned supporting cast but by the end credits it’s clear they exist simply to give Wolff a reason to go on his mission. Addai-Robinson, best known from TV work on shows like “Arrow” and “Chicago Med,” benefits from some extended screen time, although her big scene involves some third act exposition that goes on for much longer than necessary.
“The Accountant” doesn’t add anything to the conversation about autism or how people on the spectrum really lead their lives, but despite longwinded explanations, flashbacks and story swerves, it’s a tautly told story that satisfies as a thriller.