Review
Addiction
Culture
Film & TV
6 min read

Who’s by your side?

It’s tough to watch A Good Person. Its laser focus and tenderness prompts Lauren Windle to recall her experience of addiction and recovery.

Lauren Windle

Lauren Windle is an author, journalist, presenter and public speaker.

An old man accompanies a young woman into a wood-panelled hall, both look aprehensive.
Morgan Freeman and Florence Pugh in A Good Person
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

I don’t watch films about addiction. When I first got clean and sober almost nine years ago, I soaked in any piece of content I could find on drugs, drug use and recovery. At the time it was just YouTube clips of Russell Brand and the occasional memoir of a starlet who turned to cocaine before discovering yoga. After going to a 10:30am showing of Amy Winehouse documentary film Amy and bawling through the entire film, I decided to call it quits. I don’t need to see horrific stories of desperation – I’ve lived one. I am not a casual observer of addiction narratives; I’ve got skin in the game.  

In 2018 I went to see A Star Is Born thinking I was watching a rags-to-riches tale of an unlikely popstar. I quickly realised we weren’t there to witness the female protagonist’s ascent, so much as the male protagonist’s decent. I got back in my car and had to wait a quarter of an hour for the fit of hysterical tears to pass before I drove home. I had the same realisation watching A Good Person.  

Going in I knew that I had signed up to a film with Morgan Freeman and Florence Pugh. I knew that Pugh’s character Allison “had it all” before a “dramatic accident changed everything”. The ground here sounded so well-trodden that I thought I may need my wellies to navigate it. I knew that there was some element of addiction, but I envisaged a reasonably light touch depiction of a few too many nights on the sauce. 

I knew I was wrong when, about half an hour in, Allison lay on the cold bathroom floor to soothe her withdrawal from prescription opioids. She was sweating, shaking and breathless and from then on, it all felt distressingly familiar. The trajectory of her decline was too quick, too obvious, too accurate. As Allison bargained, manipulated and begged for drugs, I saw myself. As Allison looked directly into the mirror and said: ‘I hate you’ to her own glazed reflection, I saw myself. As Allison was dragged out of a stranger’s house party unable to stand up straight, I saw myself. 

The hopelessness, the false starts, empty promises and rare moments of lucidity rang so true, that I would find it hard to believe writer Zach Braff hadn’t experienced his own similar hardship. Either that or the recovering addicts they hired to consult on the project deserve a bonus of investment banker proportions.  

When Allison eventually reached out for help and asked a woman to sponsor her, the loving directness that came back was reminiscent of those I was given by my first sponsor. It was virtually word for word what I remember being told when I, nine days sober, made the same terrifying request. The experienced mentor told her: “Some beat it, some die.” And she’s right.  

Any of my friends who went to an in-patient treatment centre were told to look around because in five years a decent number of their cohort would be dead. And they were always right. Some people give up and let the tide of addiction pull them under. They feel exactly as Allison did when she told Daniel (played by Morgan Freeman): “I’m not sure I have the will.” And when she confessed in a Narcotics Anonymous meeting that: “Without [the pills] I want to die.” 

In the 2015 film Amy, the one that convinced me to stick to rom-coms, there’s a scene that stuck with me. Amy had been invited to perform at the Grammy’s but was denied a visa because of her well-documented drug use. It was arranged for her to live perform in London and it would be broadcast on big screens at the event. When the date came around she was in a stint of sobriety. She performed beautifully and won five Grammys. One of her friends burst into her dressing room to celebrate the momentous achievement but all Amy said was that it wasn’t as good without the drugs.  

 

You learn to love the cage you built around yourself and stop dreaming of more, because you are blind to anything beyond the walls you’ve created.

Getting into addiction means silencing that feeling in your Spirit that says that something isn’t right and you should go home. It’s consistently pushing through when you get a pit of your stomach urge to cut and run. Because you want the drugs, so you know you’ll have to take the chaos they’re packaged in. At some point you stop remembering that you ever felt uncomfortable, and you start to think you enjoy where you are, what you’re doing and the people you’re doing it with. You get Stockholm syndrome and life before your captor is a distant memory. You learn to love the cage you built around yourself and stop dreaming of more, because you are blind to anything beyond the walls you’ve created. You’re not happy, but what other options do you have? You could trade the misery of addiction for the misery of abstinence, but either way you’ll be miserable so you might as well do it with the drugs. 

Except, that’s not true. When we’re living our lives right, we’re living them in complete freedom. Slaves to no substance or behaviour with the freedom to say yes to what we want and, crucially, the freedom to say no. It’s the present Jesus gave us in the resurrection but so many of us, myself included, hand it back like it came with a gift receipt. 

I wish I’d known the dreams that would be realised, the friendships forged and the profound moments I would experience on the other side of those first, excruciating months of sobriety.

What I wish I could have told Amy at the Grammy’s, Allison in that NA meeting and myself when I first said the words: “I think I’m addicted”, is that there’s so much more than what you can currently see. I wish I’d known the dreams that would be realised, the friendships forged and the profound moments I would experience on the other side of those first, excruciating months of sobriety. I would have wanted to know that in time my grip would loosen, my knuckles would go from white back to their fleshy hue and I would be able to breathe again. It wouldn’t feel like a compromise or half a life or as though something was missing, but I would feel more fulfilled and alive than any drug would ever allow me. 

A Good Person demonstrates the chronic and repetitive condition of addiction with a laser sharp accuracy that, for someone with lived experience, could burn. But it’s also a tender reminder of the power of unlikely friendships forged from a mutual understanding of adversity. It made me think of the woman who scooped me up as I backed away from my first ever support group meeting and said: “You can sit next to me.” It made me grateful for the woman who mouthed “it’s going to be OK,” at me across the table as I sat there listening with tears rolling down my face. It reminded me of the awe I felt the first time I heard someone speak about the insomnia, shame and self-hatred of drug addiction, and I realised I wasn’t the only one. The film showed the transformative effect of consistent community in a way that I hope encourages people to turn up to one of those meetings like Allison and I did. I pray that it is the turning point in many people’s lives.  

Should you go and watch it? Absolutely. Just don’t ask me to go with you. 

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Review
Comment
Culture
Death & life
5 min read

'Do you guys ever think about dying...?' - Barbie

Pat Allerton reflects on the Barbie movie, the societal questions that it answers and the existential question that it doesn't.

Pat Allerton

Pat is vicar of St Peter’s Notting Hill and author of A Pocketful of Hope. 

Margot Robbie as Barbie in Greta Gerwig's Box-Office smash hit movie

So I’ve just got home from watching the brand new and much acclaimed ‘Barbie’ at the cinema (don’t worry, I also watched ‘Oppenheimer’ last week). It’s 11pm, my wife and our 8.5 month old daughter are asleep upstairs and despite having church in the morning, I feel stirred to write some thoughts.

First and foremost, huge congratulations to Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, the whole cast, crew and team. It’s an absolute belter! Full of laughs from beginning to end. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and would encourage anyone else to go and see it.

But secondly, far from being the shallow, plastic cliché that you might expect, what you actually get is an intelligent, searing critique, albeit somehow gently done, of the world we live in and what’s predominantly wrong with it. Which is, you guessed it, men. Or more specifically, patriarchy.

The film begins in ‘Barbieland’ where everything is seemingly perfect, as encapsulated by Barbie when she describes the day we first meet her as, ‘the best day ever. So was yesterday, and so is tomorrow, and every day from now until forever.’ That is, until we meet Ken (played by the excellent Gosling). It is here that the first inkling of imperfection or wrinkle in their world is detected. As the narrator (voiced by Dame Helen Mirren) makes clear, ‘Barbie has a great day every day, but Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him.’ (We’ve all been there guys). His niggling insecurity and consequent competitiveness towards other Kens however, still aren’t enough to wake Barbie from her dream-like state and reveal that all is not well in paradise.

Issues of equality, respect, independence and identity are addressed in a way that left this 'pale, stale male' challenged but not condemned. 

That moment arrives unexpectedly, during what appears to be a standard evening with ‘a giant blowout party with all the Barbies, and planned choreography and a bespoke song’ to which Ken is told he should ‘stop by’. The dance is breathtaking, the happiness palpable, and yet suddenly, as if from nowhere, Barbie blurts out the pivotal line in the film, the hinge on which the whole (Barbie) world turns, ‘do you guys ever think about dying?’ Cue the DJ’s vinyl record screeching to a halt, the choreography closing down, the dancers looking at her in disbelief, and the general sense of a serious buzz-kill. ‘Dying to dance’, she disingenuously adds, desperate to keep the party going, to shrieks of relieved delight and Dua-Lipa's return. Disaster averted, reality restored.

Except it’s not, it’s simply avoided. Avoided by everyone that is, bar Barbie. Something has changed for her, she knows it, and she must somehow find out why. That wrinkle in her world (along with the wrinkle on her thigh) turns out to be caused by a tear in the fabric separating her plastic world from the real one.

Long-story short, avoiding spoilers where I can, Barbie and Ken then embark on an eye-opening, perspective-shattering, journey from their world to the real world in order to find out where such unnerving questions (and cellulite) were coming from. Major issues with (or norms within) our world are encountered, from the objectification of women (Barbie receives immediate unwanted attention from all kinds of men), to the totally unmerited respect of any man (with someone even asking Ken if he had ‘the time’). They each go on an existential journey of discovery, with Ken delighted to learn that in the real world, men rule the roost (except for a brief time when he thought that horses did). Inspired with fresh vision, he quickly returns home in order to make some fundamental changes to and establish much of the best practice that he’s witnessed in patriarchal L.A.

I won’t say how things end up, but suffice it to say, issues of equality, respect, independence and identity are addressed in a way that left this ‘pale, stale male’ feeling both challenged but not condemned. Kudos to the team for getting that balance right! However, as big and important as these issues are, and as satisfying an ending as was reached from a social justice warrior’s point-of-view, it struck me that the biggest elephant of all was still left there in the room, or at least charging around on the beach. Because the very question that began her journey, the deepest one that woke her up, is the very one that’s just left hanging, unaddressed and ungrappled with.

The music stops and that is it. And yet don't our hearts long for more?

It’s almost as if that moment of existential angst on the dancefloor (and who hasn’t had one of them), realising the fragility of our own mortality, did nothing more than focus Barbie on the need to lay hold of everything she can in this life, rather than exploring the reality (or not) of the next. Our culture has a word for it. YOLO, if you didn’t know, standing for ‘you only live once’. Which of course is true, whether you’ve got faith or not. But the Christian worldview would go further, saying that whilst indeed you only live once, the Scriptures tell us that you also live forever (or YALF, to coin a phrase). Which sounds ridiculous on the face of it (the concept, not the phrase, although granted, YALF might not catch on). After all, as the creator of Barbie, Ruth Handler, tells us in the film, ‘ideas live forever, humans not so much.’

Unless, of course, they do, or can, which only our creator could possibly make possible. And so Ruth’s appearance raises another interesting question, if she made Barbie, who made Ruth? Only when we’re dealing with questions of this nature can we be positioned to take on the big mama (I was tempted to say ‘daddy’) question of, ‘do you guys ever think about dying?’ Which, of course, every one of us does. You can’t be human and avoid doing so. You’d have to be a doll in a made-up world.

But it’s a frightening thing to do, whether in Barbieland, in England’s green and pleasant land or anywhere for that matter. Because it all just looks so final. Like the music stops and that is it. And yet don’t our hearts long for there to be more? For one more song, for the beat to continue? Dare we hope for resurrection where life and light beat death and darkness? Because as beautiful as this life is, with all its opportunity for growth and freedom, be it in self-revelation and actualisation like Ken (the film ends with him wearing a hoodie that says, ‘I am Kenough’), or greater progress and equality on a socio-political level, experience tells us that until we have an answer for Barbie’s first and biggest question, then our own days here on earth, however good, happy and choreographed, will always be rudely interrupted by the reality of death and its long shadow. Find an answer for that... and let the DJ’s music play.

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