SUN SCORE
***
Jeong-Hyang Lee's The Way Home, a tale about a small boy and his grandmother, has inherent sentimental appeal, but Lee balances it with considerable humor and an unblinking eye toward the realities of a primitive way of life.
Eschewing professional actors, Lee gambled on little Seung-Ho Yoo to play pugnacious 7-year-old Sang-woo and on 78-year-old Eul-Boon Kim, who had never even seen a movie, to play his grandmother. As Lee has said, she got lucky.
A tired, forlorn woman (Hyo-Hee Dong) arrives in a remote mountain region with her little son in tow. With no advance notice and few words, the mother, having trudged up a rugged mountainside with her boy, dumps the kid on her own mother, who's mute, bent over with age and lives in what is little more than a ramshackle hut clinging to the hillside.
She promises her mother she'll return in about two months, by which time she expects to have landed a job and gotten her affairs in order.
Sang-woo, who bears all the marks of a kid who has been alternately neglected and indulged, understandably feels abandoned and is hit by cultural shock - what, no pizza, burgers or KFC? He reacts with predictable rage and doesn't realize or care that his grandmother, although she cannot speak, can hear him when he exclaims to her that she's stupid.
His grandmother unwaveringly responds to this and much more bratty behavior with an unconditional love.
The Way Home is simplicity itself, and Lee is alert to the details and incidents of everyday life to sustain the film with wryly amusing observations and much affection, even for the boy, who after all has been asked to go through a singularly difficult adjustment. The first South Korean film to receive major studio distribution, The Way Home is a loving little film of considerable appeal.
Kevin Thomas is a film critic for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.
The Way Home
Starring Eul-Boon Kim, Seung-Ho Yoo, Kyung-Hoon Min
Directed by Jeong-Hyang Lee
Released by Paramount Classics, Rated PG-13, Time 80 minutes