Lucas Hedges’s Addiction Drama Ben Is Back Is An Honest, if Uneven, Effort

When a character in a movie drops the line “this time will be different,“ you know not to believe it..

admin December 12, 2018 5:40 pm

When a character in a movie drops the line “this time will be different,“ you know not to believe it. In the case of Ben Is Back—the new film starring Julia Roberts and Lucas Hedges, written and directed by Lucass father, Peter Hedges—it is uttered by a hopeful mom when her son, a drug addict whos been sent away to a treatment facility, returns home on Christmas Eve. The visit was unexpected; suffice it to say that the son, Ben (Hedges)—just 77 days sober—is arriving home a bit earlier than either his parents or his sponsor feel is safe. Ben Is Back proves them right.

Rather, the genre proves them right. There have been a couple of addiction dramas with name-brand casts released this year, as well as tales of good kids gone bad. Lucass peer Timothée Chalamet starred in two of them: Hot Summer Nights (in which a straight-laced kid tries drug dealing on for size) and the tragic Beautiful Boy (not to be confused with Boy Erased, which stars Hedges—but has nothing to do with drugs). There are only so many places for a film like this to go—or at least, films like this only seem to go so many places.

But Ben Is Back is the most insightful of this new bunch nevertheless. Its also probably the biggest missed opportunity. The bare bones are familiar: Ben comes home to a surprised, wary, uncertain family. The first instinct of his mother, Holly (Roberts), besides joy at seeing her son again, is to hide her jewelry and all the pills in her medicine cabinet. Bens sister, Ivy (Kathryn Newton), has already bypassed hope and arrived at skeptical realism. Bens little siblings, spawned during Hollys second marriage, couldnt be happier to have him back; their father, Neal (Courtney B. Vance), who took out a second mortgage to pay for Bens treatment, is fed up.

Anyone familiar with addiction—or even, at this point, with movies about it—knows that the devil is in these details. You can suss out all the past traumas of Bens time as an addict, all the ways hes hurt and struggled against his family, by keeping an eye on what everyone does to protect themselves now that hes back—by not getting sucked into his fun stories, for example, which have the whiff of embellishment about them, courtesy of Lucass sensitive performance. Bens behavior, even in the present, justifies his familys instinct to hold him at a distance. One need only to hear of his mother coming home, the previous summer, to find him collapsed on the stairs with a needle in his arm to remember that.

But of course, familial love can, does, and maybe even should trump all that. Ben Is Back, in its best moments, is a good-enough display of those odds. Things start to fly off the rails a little when the familys dog goes missing and the film manufactures a reason to send Ben off the deep end with his mother in tow, coming face to face with people from his life as an addict. It becomes a strange, uneasy tour of Bens past sins—an idea that seems striking on paper, but doesnt quite prove revealing, beyond the obvious.

Better are the side interactions with people we dont really see again, such as Bens childhood doctor, who has dementia now—but who, we learn from Hollys vituperative (though not unjustified) rant in his direction, prescribed Ben painkillers at 14, kept upping the doses, and encouraged what would become a life-shattering addiction. Or a young woman Ben runs into at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting—a woman who once bought drugs from him. Or the mother of another young woman Ben dealt to, whos dead now.

Scenes like these lend an intriguing sense of community to the film—a world in which coming home from treatment means running, constantly, into ones past mistakes. But Peter Hedges, a strong writer, doesnt make the most of it as a director. His script displays a sense of intimate knowledge—its situations feel thought through, even as you wish hed made more of this material. Hollys moral and emotional negotiations with her sons actions are particularly interesting. For a moment, they steer the film in a nasty, desperate direction—but the movie falls short of really going there.

As for the acting: Roberts and Vance, both among the best performers working, could do this kind of film with their eyes closed. Maybe thats a way of saying that even if it all feels a little low effort, you can clearly see their talent. And maybe that lack of fireworks is a good thing. The film doesnt glamorize addiction, or make it irrationally melodramatic, or gussy itself up in bespoke tragedy. (The same cannot be said of Beautiful Boy.) Its all just right—even if “just right” is just O.K.