“The Long Walk” is a war film. Much like the original novel, first written by a 19-year-old Stephen King before being published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in the 1980’s, the film by Francis Lawrence stands in the shadow of a great sacrifice of young bodies on the altar of national pride. For the teenage King, the vile monolith of worship was the Vietnam War. For Lawrence and screenwriter J.T. Mollner, it seems the great evil at whose feet lie the eager dead is American Exceptionalism and the capitalistic whims of fascism. The weapon wielded by this fanatical enemy to life’s sanctity is hope, the hapless fodder are the poor and the naive, and the bloody shrapnel left lying in the dirt is nothing less than the lifeblood of the future, wasted in the ditch like so much road kill or sun-faded soda bottles filled with stale urine. Oh, amber waves of grain, indeed.
“The Long Walk” is a contest. In a not-so-distant future, after a great war has ravaged the United States into a Great Depression era dust bowl of economic destitution, the military government has enacted a yearly endurance test with life-changing rewards. The game is simple; walk at three miles an hour or more until you can’t walk anymore. If you slow down or stop walking, you earn a high-powered rifle slug to the brain. If you keep walking, if you’re the last man standing, you are granted wealth and a single wish from your friendly neighborhood authoritarian regime for propagandistic services rendered to the state. The odds are long, the road is longer, yet every year the dream of a better life leads fifty young men to try their luck, eagerly sprinting toward a hungry buzzsaw armed with the youthful pride of invincibility. The film follows Raymond Garraty #47 (Cooper Hoffman), who holds no such illusions. Winning is no guarantee, as he is dropped off by his terrified mother (Judy Greer) and left with 49 other lambs wandering to slaughter, yet he chooses to walk all the same, blinded by idealism and the hope for a better future. As their death march begins, impossibly, many of the boys become fast friends. There’s the poet with a facial scar, Peter McVries #23 (David Jonsson), the churchgoer from Baton Rouge, Arthur Baker #6 (Tut Nyuot), and the superstitious “Long Walk” expert Hank Olson #46 (Ben Wang). Together with Garraty, these four musketeers joke, encourage one another, and pick up their comrades when they falter on the road. Their warmth is illogical; not one of them can win while any other lives, but their camaraderie is pure and honest. The first of many moments that got me crying was the realization early on that these children may be blinded by ambition or incapable of perceiving the horrors looming many miles down the road, but they were still good and kind. Despite their circumstances, these boys have yet to calcify protective scar tissue around their souls, which is both inspiration and tragedy. After one of the first walkers stumbles and is executed at point-blank range, McVries asks Garraty if he expects they’ll ever get used to seeing it. “I hope not,” says Garraty. He could be any of us today, where almost every week, a video of a murdered child, as often from across the planet as one block over, shares space with Candy Crush ads. We see, yet we don’t acknowledge. We just keep walking, eyes forward, putting one foot in front of the other. “The Long Walk” forces us to endanger our own souls, stop in our tracks, turn, and bear witness.
“The Long Walk” is a mirror. Francis Lawrence has delved into these themes of child killing as entertainment and the cultural erosion of reality TV with his four, soon to be five, films in the “Hunger Games” series, itself inspired by King’s original novel. But this is Lawrence’s most affecting film, unburdened by the family-friendly glimmer of a YA adaptation and wielding an incredibly screenplay by J.T. Mollner, he is somehow able to make a film as horrifying as it is lovely, as wrenching as it is compassionate. In a lesser film, even in the novel to some extent, “The Long Walk” is seen as competition, a battle of wills to see who wants to live the most. That’s primal stuff, mean dough from which savage, flavorless bread could be made. Lawrence, instead, chooses the more devastating approach, to show these boys as brothers, comrades walking arm and arm toward an unknowable future; eager to pick each other up and even hopeful that anyone but themselves might win the grand prize. A sequence around the midpoint of the movie might be its most horrifying: a late-night hill climb with murderous consequences. Garraty struggles to keep pace while body after body falls to rifle shots at his feet. Himself one false step from being left to bleed out on the road, Garraty is saved at the last second by McVries, who grabs his shoulder and guides him to the top of the hill; brothers arm in arm, living and dying together, somehow finding love in the desolation of mutually assured oblivion. It is love Lawrence presents on “The Long Walk”, selfless love that leaves each walker exposed as much to death as being cared for by their fellow travelers. When one of the last musketeers is near death, only held aloft by the helping hands of his brothers, his internal organs hemorrhaging and blood spewing down his face, he is told that he did the best he could. “At least we made some friends,” says one of the last surviving walkers. In most movies, this sentiment, treacly and potentially vain, would be ironic and glib. Here it’s not. Not at all. “The Long Walk” is laid out in front of each of us in our own way. Not unlike the titular contest, the lottery for entry is most likely a shell game; as much our choice as it was to be born into whatever world we inherit. We are placed on the road by forces beyond our knowing and forced to walk or die. But death is always the destination. That’s the rub. That’s the joke. There is no finish line and no winner, simply more road. The only thing to be gained is a friend to hold us close and mourn us when our walk is done. Somehow, that makes me feel both hope and horror, as did “The Long Walk”.
“The Long Walk” is one of the best movies of the year. While faithful to its source, the film elevates King’s anger at the totalitarian state and shaves its rough edges into something potent and powerful, a story as much of love enduring while the world is mid-implosion as it is about how the ripples of free thought persevere in the face of crippling fascism. If “The Long Walk” is about anything, it is a reminder that We The People may be pitiful creatures cursed to walk this barren earth, but at least we are cursed to walk it together. I take comfort in that, if little else.
So go take a walk with a friend by your side.
You’ll be glad you did.
“The Long Walk” is playing at Prytania Theatres at Canal Place and The Broad Theater.
