‘Ben Stokes: Phoenix from the Ashes’ review: Captivating take on mental health in modern sport

Call it divine timing that a documentary on Ben Stokes hit our OTT screens after he delivered yet another match-winning performance with bat and ball. Stokes’ life and career as a superstar international cricketer has been defined by that word — timing. It was his best friend and worst enemy.

The legendary English all-rounder has been one of the most influential international players of the last five years. However, in mid-2021, he announced that he could no longer take it An indefinite break from the game. At his most malicious, he sat down for a chat with Academy Award-winning director Sam Mendes ( American Beauty), which forms the backdrop for a new documentary Ben Stokes: Phoenix from the Ashes.

Mendis initially declared that he was a cricket fan and was particularly interested in a man named Ben Stokes. He also tells us a fact we already know, but never tire of hearing — his life is a story you can’t script. Take a look back at some of Stokes’ highlights, good or bad: the last over in the 2016 World T20 final; A Bristol pub raid a year later; 2019 World Cup final, and four valuable extra runs for England by diving at the crease; And the Ashes jailbreak at Headingley a few months later.

Stokes is not the first professional England cricketer to open up about mental health struggles. Earlier, opening batsman Marcus Trescothick braved it in his book ‘Coming Back to Me’, recounting in graphic detail his terror in a Baroda hotel room, which led to his premature retirement. It sets an important precedent, showing that it’s okay for seemingly invincible people to feel the walls are closing in and come clean about it.

Stokes agreed to appear on camera a few weeks after announcing his hiatus, saying his recovery had made excellent progress, but Mendes had to learn that words were still hard to come by. Sitting in a large room in London, it resembles a televised counseling session between a therapist and his patient.

There, Stokes describes what an anxiety attack actually looks like — like running away when entering a packed room at a child’s birthday party; When a woman approaches a dry cleaner to sign a cricket ball, she panics. Stokes’ manager Neil Fairbrother (a former England batsman) spoke of a panicked call at 6am when his client was having a meltdown in the toilet.

England’s Ben Stokes dives into the crease and the ball runs from him to the boundary and England are awarded 6 runs by the on-field umpires during the 2019 Cricket World Cup final match at Lord’s in London. | Photo credit: Reuters

Stokes was arrested and charged with assault after a nasty fight outside a nightclub in Bristol on a September 2017 night, as revealed in the chat. Later the local court acquitted him. Police have released footage of Stokes, handcuffed and sitting in a car, talking about his allegations. Stokes became enraged when two boys “took the piss” from a male gay couple, and seconds after intervening, one of them took the bottle. Grain CCTV footage is all you need or don’t need to see what happened next.

Two important things have come to light on this incident. Stokes’ mother Deb said it was something her late husband also did on camera from her home in New Zealand. As Stokes told Mendes, he would never forgive himself if he simply moved on and did nothing.

And the time of the incident? Terrible. He missed the Ashes that followed and beat England. It certainly wasn’t Stokes’ first brush with serious trouble. The movie does not explain why he becomes a repeat offender. But it gave him, his wife Clare and his family a chance to explain their view of Bristol and its aftermath after months of negative press. As teammate Joe Root recounts in the film, the incident slowly changed Stokes.

But opening is still not easy. After hearing a long and carefully worded question from Mendes, Stokes looked back at him with glazed eyes, hunched his shoulders and said, “I don’t know, really.” The film hits you where Stokes is at his most vulnerable. For several months after that chat, a film crew will cast shadows over Stokes, especially after his return in the West Indies in 2022. In a hotel room, Stokes watches an unedited cut of this documentary and realizes how stunned he is when he sits down with Mendes. This mirrored his lowliness

Generous access to his family back home in England and New Zealand, childhood home videos and interviews with Stokes’ father Gerard in the months before his death from brain cancer in 2020, make it worth the full 105 minutes. The two glory moments of 2019 mentioned earlier have been given ample air time. But in the two years since that summer, the personal life of Ben Stokes and his family members has not been so smooth. This movie takes you there.

Ben Stokes: From the Ashes to Phoenix is ​​currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video