Real-life father and son Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez star in this film about Thomas Avery (Sheen), a respected ophthalmologist, who wishes that his adult son Daniel (Estevez), was more worldly. They’ve grown apart, but when Daniel dies while on a Christian pilgrimage in Europe, a shattered Avery rushes there. A nonbeliever, he just wants to be done with the personal duties of recovering or cremating the body and rushing back to his professional duties.
Screenwriter-producer-director-actor Estevez draws on Jack Hitt’s book “Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim’s Route Into Spain.” The story dwells on what Avery learns from, figuratively, walking in his son’s shoes.
Discovery and Renewal
Here, the pilgrim’s walk resembles an inward journey of self-discovery and renewal. The film asks: Are we better off walking alone or with company? Avery’s answer is that aloneness needn’t be loneliness. Yes, solitude refreshes. But sometimes it’s company that renews.
As a medical professional, Avery tries to help others see better. To his amusement, an elderly lady patient unabashedly memorizes his optometry vision chart so she can unfailingly recite, rather than read, its alphabets or numbers. Why? She wants her driving license renewed, without his prescribing bothersome contact lenses or glasses. Estevez’s point is that sometimes the things we’d rather do without are the very things that help us perceive life better. To Avery, that’s his inability to see that his son is different and wants different things out of life than he does.
Walking, the ever-busy Avery gifts himself something he doesn’t get back home: time and space to pause, to feel, to reflect, to change. Mourning the companionship he could’ve had with Daniel, he learns to cherish the companions he now befriends. They’re as human and as flawed as he is, yet no less worthy of care and attention.
Life’s Pilgrimage
People’s motivations for a pilgrimage differ. Some pray to God, others to a patron saint. Some undertake it for health or spiritual reasons. Others do it for emotional or social reasons. But everyone wants their reasons justified or fulfilled by the time they’re through.
Sarah’s throwaway remark that Avery doesn’t stop to smell the flowers hints that the pilgrimage of life is a miracle in itself. The miracle doesn’t need to happen at the end; the walk by itself has the power to heal old wounds and prevent new ones from forming. Healing or a miracle doesn’t always happen in the way we think it must. That God has answered a prayer doesn’t mean his answer’s been understood, let alone acknowledged.
Sarah, Jack, Joost, and Avery, in their own ways, bring their brokenness to the journey. They are unsure about who or what is supposed to heal them, but certain that it’s healing they need. They each have a proxy, an excuse, to explain why they’re there. Sarah pretends to want to kick her smoking habit. What she’s really after is forgiveness for aborting her baby daughter years ago. Haltingly, she tells Avery: “Sometimes I hear her voice. … Sounds crazy ‘cause she never got to take her first breath, but … I imagine what she would have sounded like.”
