Taking on the World
by Brian Fox
The premise of Long Way Round caught my attention immediately. “Two men circumnavigate the globe by motorcycle” was how my roommate phrased it, and the dreams of adventure that always captivated our ancestors surged inside me once again as men from that tiny island of Great Britain set off to conquer the world once more, this time astride a motorbike.
Not everyone can take a dream as fantastic as this and turn it into reality, but Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman did exactly that. The movie is a documentary in seven parts, a breakthrough for the genre which has always needed room beyond the two and a half hours normally allotted. The pair hired a third man, Claudio von Planta, to help with the extra camera work, and he gives the film many of its greatest shots. The plan was to start out from England and go east ’round the world entirely by motorcycle – except for a little bit of help from the airplane when crossing the oceans.
The story draws a lot of its driving force from the steady passage of miles, but is segmented by the difficulties and setbacks the team encounters. It is a tribute to the personalities of Ewan and Charlie that many of the best parts of the movie center on the two of them goofing around and cracking jokes as they go. The jokes are unscripted, the surprises are genuine, and the problems are real. At each stage in the journey they encounter the basic difficulties of living and learn to overcome through perseverance or creativity.
Those struggles start almost from day one. Their first motorcycle sponsor cut the funding because they thought the trip would fail – a concern that did have some merit. Then representatives from the Russian embassy told them it couldn’t be done. “You probably don’t realize how vast the country of Russia is,” one woman said. “We’re talking about hugely unpopulated areas where people were sent as punishment, you know, with the thought that people will never come back, probably because they will never find their way back.”
Then Claudio arrived in Britain without his passport and had to call his mom to fly out and give it to him. At their first Russian border crossing the trio was told they couldn’t cross. When they got to Mongolia they had no roads, the bikes perpetually got stuck in deep mud, and the locals accused them of insanity for trying such a crazy stunt. Yet despite the lack of confidence in the world around them, the men pressed on. They stayed with a man (whom I suspect was a Russian mafioso) who got them through the border and then took them home as guests, only to bring down a guitar and a Kalashnikov machine gun for entertainment. They drove the Road of Bones, built by Stalin at the cost of thousands of lives.
Whether they were visiting churches in Eastern Europe, running into villagers who fed them soup made from bull genitals, or just sitting on the bike watching as the country passed by, their journey showed us a whole different side of the world.
With each adventure, their own world grew. The two uptown actors sojourned through the empty vastness of central Asia and developed some of the rugged hardiness so evident in the people they met there.
At several points Ewan struggled over encounters with death on the journey – when local guides stopped to shoot black bears in Russia, or when calamity threatened the lives of the people with them. The struggle with death and danger came into continual focus under the unflinching eye of the camera. From highways in North America, to bandits in Kazakhstan; from the Church of Bones to the Road of Bones, death draped threateningly, urging them to insulate themselves from its cold embrace.
It is this risk of death that made the adventurers so incomprehensible to the natives, because in many ways the “fear of not truly living” is a western creation. Ewan and Charlie are afraid of giving up, of failing the test of endurance and manhood. That is why they take the risk. The desire to experience life perpetually presses them forward.
One of the only negatives of the film is the overdramatic and often unbelievable assistance crew whose sense of emergency and catastrophe was continually coupled with the phrase “this could be the end of the trip.” Without downplaying the seriousness of the crises, there is something to be said for those who had the guts to declare “this will be done” and didn’t consider giving up at every apparent problem. Ewan and Charlie wrestled with the same choice between giving up and going forward, but it was not a stage performance for them. They just considered the risk and counted the potential cost.
The story feels like a live adventure, shown as it is happening. Cultures, places, and people fill the screen with imagery and wonder. This is not the world as seen from an Indiana Jones flick, this is the real thing – every bit as unusual, but so much more fascinating because of its reality.
The motivation is simple. To everyone who asked Ewan and Charlie why they were doing this, why they would travel all this way and risk their lives, Long Way Round offers a simple answer: “We’ve decided to live.”
