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The Way brings together three creative powerhouses – acclaimed actor-turned-director Michael Sheen, renowned playwright James Graham, and iconoclast documentarian Adam Curtis. This ambitious collaboration envisions civil unrest erupting in the Welsh steel town of Port Talbot. Sheen, a native son, clearly feels a personal connection to this setting and subject matter. Graham lends his nuanced understanding of character and politics.
Meanwhile, Curtis imbues the tale with his signature incorporation of archival footage and probing of ideological undercurrents. Though an unusual mixture, these three distinct directorial voices mesh into a cohesive and compelling whole. Their combined pedigree and singular visions promise a viewing experience full of visual flair, emotional resonance, and societal relevance.
Piquing our interest is a storyline following working-class locals, anchored by the Driscoll family, as they grapple with wrenching economic and social change. The Way shapes their struggles into a gripping drama infused with magical realism. This creative chemistry presents a show brimming with both entertainment and insight. Now it’s up to the audience to judge if lightning has struck.
Families and Fractures
The Way follows the Driscolls, a working-class Welsh family entangled in growing civil unrest. Patriarch Geoff is a union rep trying to cautiously negotiate with the steel plant’s corporate owners. His estranged wife Dee becomes an impassioned leader of the swelling protests. Their son Owen struggles with addiction in the decaying town he feels trapped in. Daughter Thea walks a precarious line as a local police officer. And the ghost of Geoff’s father Denny haunts them all, a reminder of labor battles past and family demons unresolved.
Simmering tensions explode when two steelworkers die in quick succession — one in an industrial accident, another by suicide. The spark ignites long-smoldering anger over job losses and corporate indifference. Workers walk off the job. Protests choke the streets. Dee finds her calling at the barricades. Geoff pursues backroom deals even as the ground crumbles beneath his feet. Rattled owners impose draconian measures, transforming the town into an occupied zone.
As demonstrations rage and rebellion spreads, the Driscolls find themselves vilified and forced to flee as wanted fugitives. With the help of Owen’s Polish girlfriend Anna, they must run from the only home they’ve ever known, seeking refuge across the soon-to-be-closed border. Family bonds fray even further amidst the chaos. All the while, the question looms — can this embattled community come together before being torn apart? Peering through the cracks in one family, The Way illuminates fractures splitting our societies.
Hard Times and Hard Questions
At its molten core, The Way grapples with seismic economic and social changes ripping through industrial towns. It gives flesh and blood to the stark realities behind headlines about manufacturing decline and populist unrest. Peering through the blackened windows of a Welsh steel town, it confronts us with those left behind by globalization and austerity.
But this drama digs deeper than material conditions to explore their psychic impacts. We see petty grievances and sibling rivalries inflamed by community trauma. We watch men seek solace and meaning in drink, drugs, violence. The Way picks at the scabs of generational wounds from labor battles lost and the scars of forgotten promises. It shines a light on those places where simmering resentment and dashed hopes can curdle into reactionary rage.
Mythic undertones add further resonance. Invoking mystical figures and the iconography of resistance, The Way roots itself in the rich cultural inheritance of Welsh working-class solidarity. It blends the mystical and the materialist to locate the sacred within the profane – redemption within rivets, resistance within rhythms of the production line.
This alchemical mix also allows the show to play with notions of timelessness. Through archival footage spliced into this fictional world, The Way suggests the eternal return of the same struggles across the decades. Stripped of specifics, the story of the Driscolls could be any tribe facing extinction, any family fighting for survival. Their flight and search for sanctuary shine light on the plight of countless refugees fleeing in search of home.
By fusing realism and surrealism, The Way transforms intimate family drama into sweeping social commentary. Through symbolism and specificity, it alchemizes human stories into the stuff of myth.
Seeing Through the Smoke
Visually, The Way conjures up the soot-stained textures of a fading industrial town shadowed by decline. Plumes of smoke and ash suffuse the frame, backdrop turned character in this working-class drama. The camera lingers on I-beams rusting to rebar, picks out individual rivets holding this world together against gathering storms.
Inserted archive footage of union battles past and production lines now automated lends a ghostly air, suggesting the town is haunted by its own history. These newsreels blur and bleed into the filmed drama, documentary and direction intertwined. The effect is hypnotic yet haunting – we inhabit a reality somehow adjacent, attuned to echoes of traumas buried but not quite past.
When protests shatter night skies and riots choke side streets, the camera plunges us into the chaos at ground level. The disorienting choreography of violence is fragmented by jerky camerawork and rapid-fire cuts. As truncheons and tear gas fly, shot composition fractures further, perspective spliced and surreal. Yet there are moments of dreamlike beauty amidst the brutality – a falling body turned balletic, a lone figure silhouetted serene against flames.
The tonal shifts extend to the Driscolls themselves – we whip between domestic drama and magical interludes without warning. perhaps this reflects their whiplash between provincial life and police spotlights. But mostly it works to conjure a lyrical realism – the real refracted through emotion, memories morphing myths right before our eyes. By blending realist grit and impressionist flourishes, The Way creates an oneiric aura all its own.
Lighting Up the Screen
The Way boasts an impressive ensemble of Welsh talent burning bright on both sides of the camera. Anchoring it all are Steffan Rhodri and Mali Harries as the divided Driscoll parents. Rhodri nails the pathos of a principled man watching his world unravel. Harries channels the charisma of a born rabble-rouser, lighting up the screen during protest scenes. Together they make the dissolution of their marriage ache, even as their diverging politics suggests the personal and political split.
As the estranged Driscoll children, Sophie Melville and Callum Scott Howells vividly etch the scars of a fraught upbringing. Melville pivots convincingly from sibling spat to police brutality, telegraphing the psychic toll through subtle gestures. Howells turns the brooding Owen into the story’s wounded moral conscience, injecting remarkable depth into the archetype of an addict-philosopher.
Of course, Michael Sheen magnetizes in his spectral turn as dead patriarch Denny, blending lyricism and menace. His soulful gravity challenges son Geoff’s compromises, prodding at questions of legacy and meaning. Sheen haunts this drama in more ways than one – we feel his directorial hand guiding performances pitched perfectly between realism and reverie.
Some cameos feel superfluous, but the core ensemble carries us through three hours where reality, memory and myth intermingle seamlessly. Their emotive portrayals forge The Way’s steel – mixing the molten and the mundane into mirrors we can’t turn away from, even when the reflections cut close to the bone.
Getting Lost Along The Way
Spanning three hours, The Way sometimes struggles to justify its runtime. The extended format allows thoughtful exploration of weighty themes. But the bloated length also enables meandering digressions that can derail momentum.
The opening episodes expertly ratchet up tension – we feel the stakes rise palpably as civil unrest consumes the town. Yet the show then lingers on the Driscoll family drama even after forcing their exile. One recalls the broken adage: “I would have written you a shorter letter if I had more time.” Brevity can benefit storytelling.
The series works best when examining societal questions through an intimate lens. As it expands focus to geopolitical conflicts in later episodes, the pacing suffers. Overstuffed plot lines diffuse dramatic intensity rather than concentrating it. And some mystical figures introduced to heighten the mood feel vestigial by the finale.
More successful is the show’s format innovation. Director Sheen skillfully integrates documentary techniques like archival footage. This layered bricolage of real media creates deeper resonance. The constructed reality becomes richer but also more unsettling.
By the conclusion, both strengths and flaws emerge from Walter Benjamin’s angel of history struggling to keep up with the mad rush of progress. There is brilliance here, but filtered through an overabundance. In the end, one wishes some restraint had reined in revolutionary aspirations before creative energies evaporated. The Way demonstrates ambition, yes, but perhaps needed more dyed-in-wool editing.
Signs of Promise
For all its flaws, The Way still shows more daring innovation than most TV dramas. This wildly uneven work in progress suggests a production team willing to risk big swings – and sometimes strike out as a result. But such creative ambition deserves encouragement, especially when realizing a bold vision on a broadcaster budget.
The series works best when drilling down on intimate human stories rather than tackling sweeping societal woes in paint-by-numbers fashion. If leaning more into character studies, a second season could build on foundations laid here. As they stand, the Driscolls emerge as complex creations enmeshed in contradictions of community and country. Their saga epitomizes dilemmas of a nation in flux, even as magic realism elements modernize myths of Welsh identity.
And whatever its shortcomings, Michael Sheen’s directorial debut announces a new auteur joining TV’s creative vanguard. His hypnotic style shows aesthetic daring, a refreshing counterpoint to workmanlike approaches. One eagerly anticipates his future projects.
So while not fully hitting the mark, The Way offers glimpses of transcendence piercing through the smoke. Its raging furnace churns out uneven metal, but we can still hammer out some shine if we try. For patient viewers willing to squint past its impurities, traces of gold may yet glimmer in your eyes.
The Review
The Way
A flawed but fiery drama, The Way burns uneven but bright. Sheen makes a promising directorial debut even if the series itself rarely transcends technique over substance. Its unfulfilled potential leaves you wanting more, but ambition still earns some accolades.
PROS
- Audacious format and visual style
- Great performances, particularly from Rhodri, Harries, Howell, Melville
- Timely themes around economic inequality, globalization, and populism
- Message of working-class solidarity strongly conveyed
- Sheen proves he's an exciting new directing talent
CONS
- Overambitious - tries to cram in too many storylines and ideas
- Plot can be difficult to follow and keep up momentum
- Some elements don't fully connect or lack depth of exploration
- Ends up feeling overstuffed yet unsatisfying in parts
- Mystical aspects don't fully mesh with realist approach
