Ben Affleck finds redemption in sobering sports drama 'The Way Back'

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We all know, logically, that actors aren’t the roles the play — that Ben Affleck isn’t actually Batman any more than he’s an astronaut or…

appears on his resumé, it’s almost impossible not to transpose life and art. Here is a movie star who has publicly shared his decades-long battle with alcoholism, a two-time Oscar winner whose career slump and personal struggles seem to run exactly parallel to that addiction.

Affleck is Jack Cunningham, a construction worker somewhere in blue-collar Southern California who starts every day with a beer in the shower and a few glugs of clear liquor in his coffee mug. Eight hours later, he pops another can from the cooler he keeps in his truck, then heads to the bar. At least he seems like a fairly easygoing drunk, more a slow slumper than a screamer or a fighter. But it’s still taken a toll: The concerns of his worried sister and estranged wife are met with sullenness, resentment, or at best, silence; if there's anything that manages to make him smile, it's usually at the bottom of a bottle.

So when the pastor principal at his old high school calls to offer his onetime star player a job coaching their now-faltering boys’ basketball team, his first response is to insist over the phone that his life is “very full right now. Very full.” His 14th, after about a case of Coors, is a slurred, half-conscious yes.

The idea of basketball as a vehicle for spiritual redemption is hardly new to cinema; the general arc of

 

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