We don’t see it all, but that’s more or less what Liam did in every rehearsal in advance of Live ’25—with the exception of the last rehearsal, which he skipped. But then, just as they walked out in Cardiff, Wales, for the first Oasis gig since 2009, Liam did something else that unnerved Noel: he grabbed his hand and raised them both up, with the two of them taking the stage in a kind of spontaneous triumph of brotherhood. The “healing,” if you will, didn’t happen by talking it out; it happened by being in the same room, and on the same stage, long enough together for them both to realize how great they were together when things worked the way they should.
The film also benefits from some astounding luck. On the one day when they were able to film inside St. Bernard’s Church in Burnage, Manchester—where both Liam and Noel were baptized—Father Luke Bradbury’s reading from the Bible—selected months, if not years in advance, by the Vatican—just happened to be about the biblical theme of brotherly forgiveness (”Peter came to Jesus and asked, ‘Lord, how many times must I forgive my brother, who has sinned against me?’”). Father Bradbury notes the throngs of people gathering in the streets for the Oasis gig taking place that weekend in the city, he talks about the rift between the two brothers, and he adds that forgiveness “doesn’t necessarily mean forgetting what happened—it means looking forward, not back.”
If I have a criticism of Don’t Look Back in Anger, it’s that the occasional fan stories interspersed throughout the film—people of all ages from all around the world who are devoted to Oasis, many of whom credit the band for getting them through hard times or for being either a rock of stability or the perfect escape from a world gone mad—while wonderful, are occasionally a bit too much of a detour. By the time we get to the South Korean haenyeo (traditional free diver) who tells us—in between dives where we see her harvesting abalone, conch, and sea urchins—how Oasis helped her through problems with depression and anxiety, I’m anxious to get back to the gigs, and to hear the brothers explain, in their inimitable way, how they got to where they’re at.
“It was all forgiven without saying a word,” Noel says. Liam, typically, has a slightly more askew take on things: “It takes a lot of caring,” he says, “to not give a fuck.”
A decade ago, Noel said something that resonated with me at the time, and it came back to me in the screening room: “You couldn’t say that anyone that was ever in Oasis, me included, was the best in the world at anything,” he said. “But when it all came together, we made people feel something that was indefinable—and people will never forget the way you made them feel.”
The great triumph of this film—whether you were lucky enough to score tickets to last summer’s tour or not—is that, for two hours and three minutes, you’re not a bystander. You’re squarely in the middle of that feeling.
