Don't stop believin'

Air is a biopic you can believe in, says Yaroslav Walker, thanks to an awesome soundtrack and the hint of deeper themes.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is assistant priest at Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, London.

A woman stands in a kitchen diner hold a phone with a cord.

Viola Davis negotiating down the line.

Warner Bros

Air should not work as a film. A sports biopic that barely has any actual sport in it, but has plenty of shoe design. A plot that revolves around the character of Michael Jordan (considered by many to be the greatest basketball player of all time, if not the greatest athlete of all time) which goes as far as to show the back of his head until the end credits, when stock footage takes over. A film that drops a number of hints about interesting character development (Matt Damon’s gambling, Jason Bateman’s daughter), and then never follows them up. None of this should add up to much…and yet it does.

Mark Kermode (very much this reviewer’s lodestar of critique) has often opined that you know a biopic is doing its job when it makes you invested in a field you know nothing about. Senna makes you care about motorsport. Cinderella Man makes you care about boxing. Well, Air genuinely made me care about corporate sponsorship and shoe design…and I certainly wasn’t expecting that!

The script is fondue levels of cheesiness, Matt Damon gives a climactic speech which simply oozes baked Camembert.

The direction is fine – Affleck has shown that he can be perfectly competent as an actor/director, and he does a fine job. The script is fondue levels of cheesiness, Matt Damon gives a climactic speech which simply oozes baked Camembert, but is also laugh out loud funny on more than one occasion. The performances are all on point: Matt Damon and Viola Davis can pull-off earnest roles in their sleep, and Affleck and Bateman deliver some decent ‘straight-man’ material. Affleck also demonstrates his directorial skills with shrewd and limited use of actors who can over-stay their welcome (Chris Tucker…small doses).

However, the thing that sells the film to me is the soundtrack. The film is one big nostalgia-trip, and I loved it for that. I have long championed the theory that the 1980s was the best decade for popular music, and this film confirms my theory. The moment the Violent Femmes started to play I was sold. Cindy Lauper, Run-D.M.C, Springsteen, The Alan Parsons Project! BLISS! Throw in a Smiths and a Bowie track and I’d be giving this film an Oscar! 5 stars (but only because I’m listening the soundtrack at this very moment).

Air hints at some deeper themes (although it does little more than hint) and one of these is the power of belief, the power of having faith in something. Affleck’s shoe-mogul, Phil Knight, has had faith in himself to build up Nike as a successful brand – and now spouts lazy quasi-Buddhist aphorisms. Davis’ Deloris Jordan has absolute faith in her son’s sporting ability, and refuses to allow it to be overlooked. Damon’s Sonny (a talent scout for possible sponsorship opportunities) is a gambler – he has belief in his own luck, his own scrappy attitude. He shoots craps in Vegas and demands his bosses back him because of his gut: ‘This is what I do here, and I really feel it this time!’ He truly believes in the value and power of sport to change his fortunes, and to change the world.

From a Christian perspective it raises some interesting ideas, but doesn’t raise them quite high enough. The Christian life is one of belief, one of faith, one of ‘taking a chance’. Yet, the chance the Christian takes is not really a gamble, not a roll-of-the-dice, but a relationship. The Christian takes a chance, but it is taking a chance on love. Whereas the characters of Air take a chance on the sporting ability of a yet un-tested Michael Jordan, the Christian finds a certain surety in the loving embrace of Jesus Christ. Having religious faith, having Christian faith, is so often mischaracterised as a blind gamble – rather it is a relationship with one who loves us unconditionally, and so is not as irrational as assuming one can win shooting dice, but is the truest and most sensible thing one can do.

Review

Culture

Theatre

24 June 2024

5 min read

The ancient drama of rehab

People Places & Things is a modern play with old stories.

Simon Walsh

Simon Walsh is a communications consultant, journalist and non-stipendiary priest in the Diocese of London.

on a stage a woman kneels on a bed amid frantic action around her.

Denise Gough as Emma.

‘There is no higher power,’ says a character defiantly in People Places & Things, the revival of Duncan Macmillan’s 2015 play about addicts and addiction. It’s an echo from Greek tragedy when anyone denies the gods, and now has a modern ring in all the self-help, self-belief talk of recovery and resolve.

Denise Gough reprises her lead performance as Emma for which, last time around, she swept the board in awards and nominations. It’s easy to see why. She’s on stage almost the entire time, compelling and fluent throughout. The opening scene has her in the white-box modern set wearing a Victorian costume, for her character is an actress in Chekhov’s The Seagull – almost meta, and the first hint and how this a show where realities and identities blur with layers upon layers.

Soon after, Emma (if that is her real name) checks into a rehab unit. She doesn’t feel she has a problem but is there for a break. ‘Drugs and alcohol have never let me down,’ she says at one point. A brisk female doctor in a white coat admits her, played by Sinéad Cusack. A couple of scenes later, Cusack reappears as the clinic’s group therapist. This time she’s full of empathy – barefoot and with a scarf over one shoulder – all herbal tea and sympathy.

But the therapist’s work with her charges is vital. Some even get to ‘graduate’ and host a non-alcoholic party the night before they leave, having successfully stayed the course. Probably not Emma though. She’s too feisty, individually unable to admit her problems, and inevitably she crashes. There’s a naturalistic feel to the production and narrative, even when it jolts into dream-like sequences or bright lights with thumping techno music.

Anyone with experience of an addict or addiction will find it all too familiar. The later scene where Emma returns to the parental home is a crucible of pain, and embodies the play’s title. It concerns ‘the people who can make us relapse, the places which trigger associations, and the things which are the props of the old habits’. And it’s made more complex by the family in grief over the recent, sudden death of Emma’s beloved brother in a freak accident. ‘It should have been you instead’ is the parental curse on this remaining child.

There’s a slow and silent feel to the way it develops. The word inexorable comes to mind, something that cannot be changed or stopped. Like Greek tragedy, the tension is in how this will resolve, and if it will turn out as badly as feared. It does and it doesn’t, which is at least true to the addiction journey.

Jeremy Herrin expertly directs an intensely fine cast: Russell Anthony, Holly Atkins, Ryan Hutton, Malachi Kirby, Danny Kirrane, Paksie Vernon, Kevin McMonagle, Ayò Owóyemi-Peters, Lousie Templeton, Dillon Scott-Lewis. These are nuanced, crafted performances which inhabit Bunny Christie’s versatile, stylish set with presence.

What the healings have in common is the aftermath – a sense of vision restored, stability refound, new clarity...

Faith plays at the edges of this work. There are passing references to religion: a ‘bibling grief’, communion wine, the power of prayer. More tears, said St Teresa of Avila, are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones, and this outward expression of a cry for help connotes the spiritual struggle of addicts along with their pity. As the first disciples themselves asked, ‘Teach us, Lord, how to pray.’

Addiction was not something Jesus had much to say about. Healings take place throughout each of the four gospels. The sufferers present with various ailments and of differing origins. For some it is hereditary, others through sin (such as when Matthew records Jesus healing a paralyzed man with the words ‘your sins are forgiven’). At other times there is a clear need for recognition such as when Jesus visits his hometown. He ‘laid hands on a few sick people and cured them’ but otherwise ‘could do no deed of power there… and was amazed at their unbelief’.

These healings, however, do not obviously deal with addiction. The closest connection is probably the examples which deal with demons. The encounter with a man possessed in the land of the Gerasenes, a little earlier, is instructive. Here is someone who ‘lived among the tombs; and no one could restrain him anymore, even with a chain; for he had often been restrained but the chains he wrenched apart; and no one had the strength to subdue him’. But Jesus confronts the demon, the ’unclean spirit’, and sends it into a herd of swine ‘numbering about two thousand, which then rushes to the sea and is drowned.

What the healings have in common is the aftermath – a sense of vision restored, stability refound, new clarity. The healed demoniac is found with Jesus, ‘sitting there, clothed and in his right mind’, though the swineherds do not believe it and remain scared. They beg Jesus to leave and the ex-demoniac wants to go with him, but Jesus tells him to stay: ‘Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you.’ He is to give his testimony.

Drama at its heart has to be about telling a story and finding a universal truth.

It’s a running debate that lived experience and life identity are now more important than acting ability when it comes to race, sexuality, gender and so on. Denise Gough has given testimony ahead of this run – how as a teenager she fled her native Wexford for London where she fell into homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, and was the victim of grooming. She has told her story, with purpose, much as those people who experienced healing and deliverance gave their own account to the Early Church.

Drama at its heart has to be about telling a story and finding a universal truth. The gospels are full of this, with redemption and rehabilitation. Lives changed, sins forgiven, and a new future made possible. There is power in believing, and knowing that when someone might stumble and fall, it is not the end. In fact, it might just be the beginning.

People, Places & Things is on at the Trafalgar Theatre, Whitehall, London, SW1A 2DY, until 10 August 2024.