Review: The Way, My Way

The Way, My Way is the film of director Bill Bennett's book about how he walked the 800-kilometre pilgrims' walk - the Camino de Santiago. The Way, My Way is the film of director Bill Bennett's book about how he walked the 800 kilometre pilgrims' walk - the Camino de Santiago. Watch the movie trailer here.The Camino de Santiago is an extraordinary, Spanish phenomenon that seems to have outgrown its medieval, religious origins.It's an 800-kilometre trek from the border of France to the city of Santiago, where the faithful believe are buried the remains of the Apostle St James - 'Santiago' in Spanish.But it's far more than that now, according to Australian director Bill Bennett.He tells us he isn't particularly religious - certainly not when he walked the Camino himself - and wasn't even sure why he became so obsessed with doing it in the first place.But he did it, he wrote a book about his experience - The Way, My Way - and the book was a big success.Even then, Bennett had to be bullied into making a movie of it. A movie in which most of the people in the book are played by the people themselves, including his wife, Jennifer Cluff, who also produced the film.One person played by a real actor was Bennett himself. He brought in veteran Australian actor Chris Hayward to play him.Though, no offense to Hayward, but there's not a lot of obvious acting going on here. In many ways the filmThe Way, My Way is like every TV travel series since Michael Palin.Bill keeps denying he's driven by major existential questions as he takes the Walk, but without them, it's essentially one foot in front of the other for hundreds of kilometers.If this is going to be any sort of traditional movie, we're going to need some pretty exciting travel-mates.Well - I'm told it's a Camino thing - the Way doesn't really encourage travelling in company.Although fictional Bill meets real-life walkers Bolosz, Laszlo and Rosa, they don't normally walk together. They do it at their own speed, usually solo, though regularly running into each other along the way.While this is great for authenticity, it does tend to mean we're invited to connect with people we don't know anything about at the beginning, and not much more about by the end.This is fine in a book, but, since The Way, My Way is set up as a movie, couldn't it have provided a bit more fictional drama along the way?This reveals my lack of spirituality, obviously, and I have to concede that even without characters or much in the way of plot, the Way itself is picturesque and restful…Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details