In “The Way Back,” Ben Affleck, somber and looming, with a no-frills conviction he hasn’t shown as an actor in quite some time, plays Jack Cunningham, a former high-school basketball superstar who never made it big and has fallen on hard times.
Jack, now in his mid-40s, is a Los Angeles construction worker who drinks all day long, mostly hiding the booze in plain sight.
On his break at a skyscraper building site, he sips from a metal canister (no one has to know that there’s vodka in there), and he’s a nightly customer at a tin-shack dive called Harold’s Place, where he sits around laughing and doing shots with the other regulars — which, of course, just looks like “regular” behavior.What stays hidden is that Jack has a can of Cutters beer in his morning shower, and can put away a dozen more of
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