Addict’s family story gets its hooks into you
Ben Is Back
K (out of 4) Starring Julia Roberts, Lucas Hedges. Directed by Peter Hedges. Opens Friday at Cineplex Varsity & VIP. 103 minutes. 14A
Ben comes home unexpectedly the day before Christmas. It is not a gift his mother, stepdad and younger sister are particularly glad to receive.
Ben is 77 days clean and sober thanks to a rehab facility that’s costing the family dearly. But his past exploits as a user and dealer make for a very cool reception from everyone except his two much younger half-siblings. Sister Ivy is particularly cynical, noting Mom’s first act is to clean out the medicine cabinet and hide all the pharmaceuticals along with the jewelry.
“This time will be different. You’ll see,” mom Holly (Julia Roberts) assures her, with a bright smile bordering on brittle. To Ben, she’s more direct. He can’t be out of her sight for the next 24 hours. She even watches from a discreet distance as he takes a urine test to ensure he is indeed clean.
But old sins have long shadows and when a fellow junkie spots Ben at a mall, word spreads fast through the underground junkie world.
And when the family returns from a Christmas Eve concert, the house has been broken into, the tree has been toppled and the family dog is nowhere to be found. This sends mother and son on a dark and increasingly harrowing journey, straining the bond between them and testing Ben’s tenuous grasp on recovery.
Written and directed by Peter Hedges, who also wrote What’s Eating Gilbert Grape — another aching family drama, which launched Johnny Depp as an actor worth watching back in 1993 — the story seizes on the opioid crisis that is sweeping North America and elsewhere, an addiction juggernaut that continues to take an unprecedented toll on families and communities large and small.
It’s also a story about addiction itself, the lies addicts tell the people they love and the hope and crushing despair families face in watching helplessly from the sidelines.
Hedges’ story brings it all together in a story that is urgent and unexpectedly suspenseful right down to the final frame.
Roberts delivers a poignant portrait of a loving mother struggling to save a son even as she realizes how little power she has. A moment when Holly unleashes her rage at the family doctor — now mired in dementia — who got her son hooked on painkillers is among the film’s most powerful moments.
Lucas Hedges offers a complex and affecting performance as Ben, a young man haunted by remorse and self-doubt. It’s a solid and totally believable portrayal. Michael Esper has a nice cameo as Clayton, a dealer who gleefully dishes out payback to his former associate.
Although Ben Is Back has a Christmas backdrop, it is anything but a feel-good tale about redemption and miracles. Rather, it is a well-crafted and heart-rending tale anchored by two fine performances that speaks to a scourge of modern times that destroys lives, tears apart families and shows no signs of abating.