Monthly Archives: March 2019

  • Ben Is Back

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peter Hedges (2018)

    Both of Lucas Hedges’s latest films have arrived in cinemas on the heels of another movie with the same theme.  In Boy Erased, Hedges played a teenager subjected to gay conversion therapy, like Chloë Grace Moretz in The Miseducation of Cameron Post.   In Ben Is Back, written and directed by his father Peter, he is a young man struggling with drug addiction, like Timothée Chalamet in Beautiful Boy.  The latter two films are similar too in focusing on the effects of addiction on a son’s relationship with a loving parent.  Boy Erased, unlike Cameron Post, derives from a real-life memoir.  Ben Is Back, unlike Beautiful Boy, doesn’t and Peter Hedges’s far-fetched screenplay is the film’s fundamental problem.

    During Christmas Eve, Ben turns up at the family home, having discharged himself from the rehab centre where he’s currently receiving treatment.  While Ben’s mother Holly (Julia Roberts) is stunned but thrilled to see her elder son, his sister Ivy (Kathryn Newton) is alarmed – so is his stepfather Neal (Courtney B Vance), the father of Holly’s two much younger children, Lacey (Mia Fowler) and Liam (Jakari Fraser).  After an urgent confab, Holly and Neal agree that Ben can stay for twenty-four hours, on condition that he doesn’t leave his mother’s sight.  The action duly ends twenty-four hours later.  During that time, Holly fails more than once to keep tabs on Ben but they’re together in the film’s closing scene, in which she performs CPR on him.  He starts to breathe again just before the screen goes dark.  Rather than concluding, Ben Is Back eventually just stops – Hedges Sr’s way of making the point that, in this situation, closure isn’t an option, let alone a happy ending.  Although this seems reasonably honest, it doesn’t make what’s gone before any less contrived and implausible.  The compressed timeframe, designed to give extra intensity to proceedings, succeeds only in making the narrative overwrought, in both senses of the word.

    It’s about halfway through that the film plunges into melodrama and never again comes up for air.  The family returns home from an evening Christmas service – where Ivy sings a choir solo and Lacey and Liam appear in the nativity play – to discover their house has been broken into and the family dog Ponce has disappeared.  (Ponce presumably doesn’t mean in the US what it means in the UK.)   Ben instantly knows this must be the work of people on the local drug-dealing circuit who’ve a score to settle with him.  Holding his domestic pet hostage might seem an odd weapon of choice on the part of the drug lords:  Ponce is a scruffy mongrel rather than a pedigree animal, and how do the dealers know about him anyway?  Reasonably attentive viewers won’t find the kidnap surprising, though.  Earlier on, Ben has felt the sudden urge to attend a 12-steps meeting; Holly takes him to the nearest one available.  He recounts to the other addicts there how, when he overdosed, his life was saved by the nick-of-time intervention of his mother and his dog.  You get a strong suspicion, as soon as Ponce is abducted, that history may be set to repeat itself.

    Before it does, Peter Hedges uses the dog’s disappearance as a means of putting a little flesh in the bones of Ben’s backstory.  People from his recent past have already made their presence felt fleetingly.  In the mall where Holly has taken him to do some last-minute Christmas shopping, eye contact with someone he recognises unnerves Ben – that’s why he has to get to an addiction group meeting.   At the meeting, a girl (Alexandra Park) whom he doesn’t recognise tells Ben he used to be her dealer and asks if he wants to get high for old times’ sake.  (She gives him drugs that Holly discovers and confiscates when she and Ben resume their shopping trip.)  Just before the start of the church service, Holly expresses her condolences to a distraught-looking woman in the congregation.  This is Beth (Rachel Bay Jones), whose late daughter Maggie was Ben’s former girlfriend – a relationship that got Maggie into the drugs that killed her.

    Now, as Holly and Ben drive round the neighbourhood in search of Ponce, the quest becomes an awkward sightseeing tour – here is the spot where Ben first used, there the site of a robbery he took part in.  They briefly visit one of his high school teachers (Henry Stram); Holly is appalled to learn this man used to supply Ben with drugs in return for sex.  They look through the window of the home of Maggie’s estranged father (Jeff Auer), who rushes out and smashes a window in Holly’s car, yelling furiously at Ben.  In a diner, mother and son are confronted by the hopped-up Spencer (David Zaldivar), a childhood friend of Ben’s revealed as the person who spooked him in the mall.  The two soon comes to blows but Spencer at least confirms the identity of the dog-snatcher, a dealer called Clayton.  In the course of their journey, Ben keeps telling his mother he’s not worth bothering with and that it’s for him alone to sort things out.  Holly assures him she isn’t going anywhere but, while they’re in a petrol station shop, Ben catches her off guard and drives away.

    In the closing stages, Ben Is Back turns into a nearly ludicrous suspense thriller.  Ben confronts Clayton (Michael Esper), who forces him to do a drug run if he wants his dog back.  Holly, meanwhile, calls on Beth, who not only agrees to lend Holly her car to try and track Ben down but also has the foresight to give her a medical kit for reviving a person who has OD’d.   Ben doesn’t leave empty-handed either, from his meeting with Clayton:  as well as retrieving Ponce, he’s rewarded with narcotics for carrying out the drug run.   Both principals make use of their gifts to deliver the film’s climax.  Ben leaves Ponce in his mother’s car and puts a note on the windscreen, telling whoever sees it to phone Holly’s mobile number.  He then overdoses on what Clayton gave him and wanders into a nearby barn to die.   A passer-by phones Holly as requested.  She drives to the scene, finds her own car and opens the door.  Out jumps Ponce – at which point, I shouted (inwardly), ‘No, don’t let him run away!’   By this stage, I’d tired of the non-stop action but was emotionally invested in the lost dog story.  I needn’t have worried, of course.  Ponce makes straight for the barn, followed by Holly, who has the resuscitation kit handy.

    Julia Roberts’s performance has received plenty of praise – another instance of mistaking conspicuous acting for great acting.  Roberts overdoes it from the word go, as Holly watches Ben’s siblings in rehearsals at the church.  Even though her famously huge, radiant smile is always going to be hard to ignore, Roberts works her face to emphasise overflowing mother-love.  As soon as Ben appears, she goes into overdrive.  Roberts’s histrionic energy level is remarkably sustained but its effect is a bit unfortunate.  It’s Holly rather than Ben who looks to be on something.

    Although he’s only just turned twenty-two, Lucas Hedges already needs to guard against being typecast as sensitive and vulnerable.  He showed those qualities in abundance in his breakthrough role in Manchester by the Sea (2016) but the teenager he played in Kenneth Lonergan’s film was a rich character – strong-willed, cussed and wittily sarcastic too.  With much thinner material, Hedges’s portrait of Ben is admirable, nevertheless.  (It’s good, for a start, to see him clearly again after the murk of Boy Erased.)  He’s marvellous in the early scenes, when Ben first comes home and plays around with Lacey, Liam and Ponce.  Strumming a guitar and singing a humorous made-up song to the younger children, Hedges expresses, as well as Ben’s natural charm, an undercurrent of grim determination to stay positive.  His easy interactions hint at the essentially happy family life that preceded his addiction.  As he showed memorably in the icebox scene in Manchester by the Sea, Lucas Hedges has a genius for uncontrollable crying and for making his tears infectious.  He reconfirms it as Ben listens to Ivy’s solo in the church service.

    It’s no surprise that plenty of American reviewers have praised Ben Is Back for confronting the national ‘opioid epidemic’ and Peter Hedges does make some effort to root the story in a community.  He seems interested too in exploring character rather than simply describing an addict’s behaviour.  For these reasons (and for Lucas Hedges), I prefer the film to Beautiful Boy.  But Hedges Sr increasingly sacrifices these promising elements for melodramatic mechanics and when he occasionally tries for brutal honesty the result is harshly unconvincing – as in two sequences meant to illustrate the depth of Holly’s distress and anger.

    In the first of these, she and Ben, when they first arrive in the shopping mall, bump into an elderly couple – their family doctor (Jack Davidson), now retired, and his wife (Kristin Griffith).  The doctor is suffering from dementia and doesn’t recognise Holly or Ben.  Holly offers to sit with him while the wife goes on a brief errand.  While she’s gone and Ben is standing out of earshot, Holly tells the doctor that she holds him responsible for her son’s condition.  As a young teenager, Ben needed medication for a minor snowboarding injury.  The doctor wrongly assured Holly the drugs he prescribed were not addictive.  She now tells the doctor she hopes he dies a terrible death.   The second sequence is in a cemetery (whose graves also feature in introductory scene-setting shots) – exasperated by her son, Holly demands to know from him exactly where he wants to be buried.  The effect, again, is too emotionally strident.  One more, and a more trivial, niggle:  what this Christmas story gains from calling the mother and daughter Holly and Ivy is beyond me.

    16 March 2019

  • Ray & Liz

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Billingham (2018)

    When a film-maker opens with a shot of a fly buzzing round a naked light bulb, it’s often a hint of grim social realism to follow.  So it is with Ray & Liz but the fly isn’t the only insect in evidence in writer-director Richard Billingham’s portrait of his upbringing on a Black Country council estate, and insects aren’t the only part of the animal kingdom the film features.  There are different layers of menagerie.   A portrait of a tiger is among several pieces of art on the walls of the family home; materfamilias Liz attempts a jigsaw that’s a picture of tigers too and drinks from a mug with a fox on it.  There’s always a dog in the Billinghams’ flat, high up in a high-rise; at different times, their other household pets include a budgie, a hamster, a rabbit and snails.  When Richard’s younger brother Jason skives off school, he visits a zoo, where a giraffe takes centre stage.  When Jason stays overnight in the more comfortable and comforting surroundings of a friend’s home, a pattern of jolly exotic beasts adorns the bedroom curtains.

    Then there are the human animals.  In the closing conversation between him and Liz, the alcoholic Ray describes himself as ‘happy as a pig in shit’ – for as long, he says, as his friend Sid keeps drawing dole on his behalf and bringing bottles of home brew to the flat where Ray, now living apart from Liz, spends his days, mostly in bed.  An earlier, much longer sequence describes the calm bestiality of the couple’s sociopathic lodger, Will.  Ray and Liz go out, leaving the two young children in the care of Ray’s brother Lol, who is like a big kid himself – he’s seriously overweight, evidently has learning difficulties.  Will eggs the babysitter on to sample each of the various types of alcohol available in the flat.  When Lol passes out, Will daubs the infant Jason’s face in shoe polish and puts a carving knife in his hand.  Ray and Liz return to find Lol still out cold.  Before he got drunk, he described his sister-in-law to Will as having ‘a bit of Nazi in her’ and Liz, enraged by what’s gone on in her absence, uses a shoe to bash and bash again Lol’s insensible head.  In later scenes, Billingham shows dog pee drenching an official-looking brown envelope arrived through the letterbox, as well as rabbit droppings on the sofa; in the standout excretory image, after the barely conscious Lol has thrown up, the family dog pads over to lap at the puddle of vomit.

    This is Richard Billingham’s first feature film.  He’s made shorts before but his reputation is chiefly as a photographer and his parents have been prominent in that side of his work too:  according to Wikipedia, Billingham ‘is best known for the photography book Ray’s A Laugh (1996), which documents the life of his alcoholic father Ray, and obese, heavily tattooed mother, Liz’.  Visual compositions dominate the first half of Ray & Liz, which is largely uneventful in terms of plot.  When something does happen, it tends to happen deliberately though sometimes to absorbing effect – as, for example, when Ray and Liz are asleep in bed in the middle of the day and Richard encourages Jason to pour chilli powder into their father’s gaping mouth.  The spoonful of powder starts to tip as if in slow motion towards its target.  Billingham’s insistent description of domestic squalor, punctuated by emotional brutality, seems designed to compel and repel at the same time.  For three people, in an audience of around twenty in Curzon Bloomsbury’s Minema, the balance clearly swung too far in the direction of repulsion (and/or boredom).

    My immediate reaction was to envy these walkouts but I felt I should stay with Ray & Liz and was glad that I did, chiefly because of how much it changes in the second half, when it gradually becomes Jason’s story.  Elder brother Richard, in comparison, is less a participant in what’s happening than an observer and a recorder – literally a recorder when he hands his mother, after her assault on her brother-in-law, audiocassette proof that Will was the prime mover in the debacle.  The increasing focus on a vulnerable, ill-treated child makes the narrative more familiar and, to be honest, less uncomfortable because you sympathise unreservedly with the little boy.  It’s harder to do so with the adults, in spite of their materially deprived circumstances.  This is Thatcher’s Britain but Billingham makes it difficult to see his unemployed parents as representative victims of a political regime:  they are, in the context of the film, feckless like no one else  Their flat’s décor and appliances do suggest the family’s standard of living has declined but there’s little to suggest that that has changed Ray or Liz as people.  The nasty Will comes over as naturally vicious rather than the product of socio-economic circumstance.

    Although aware that Ray & Liz had had mostly good reviews, I was surprised to find consensus in the ones I read after seeing the film that, to quote Wendy Ide in the Observer, ‘it’s made with as much love as anger’, particularly in relation to the portrayal of the mother.  For this viewer, the things Liz does and says that registered most strongly were her reaction to Richard’s secret recording and to seeing Jason again after he’s stayed a couple of nights at his friend’s.  Deciding to ignore the audiocassette evidence, she unspools the tape and it ‘piles up around her ankles like Rapunzel hair’ (Ryan Gilbey, New Statesman).  Out for an uncharacteristic walk together, she and Ray bump into Jason and the other boy playing in parkland.  Liz grumpily asks where her son’s been in recent days, without evident concern or interest in the answer.  She and Ray are wheeling a pram and the camera cuts to its passenger – the family’s pet rabbit.  Both these instances, in other words, provide eye-catching, verging on surreal images but they aren’t enough to distract attention from the implications of Liz’s behaviour.

    The moments where the title characters are presented sympathetically are ones in which they’re virtually disengaged from the narrative and from other people.  There are repeated shots of Liz working on her jigsaw.  In the final sequence, solitary Ray shows he’s not really as happy as a pig in shit:  he weeps silently, as a radio plays Dusty Springfield’s ‘Some of Your Lovin’’.  These more compassionate glimpses of Ray and Liz are also the more conventional elements of the film.  Liz’s multi-coloured floral dress and the tones of the jigsaw pieces are a striking combination but the metaphorical sense of the image is hardly original:  failing to complete a jigsaw signals trying vainly to puzzle out your life and get it to fit together.  Billingham isn’t above cliché:  I didn’t include in the list of zoological details above the wildlife programmes showing on the flat’s television – a by now overused analogue to goings-on in the human jungle.

    Judging from the ages of the youngsters playing Richard and Jason, the larger part of the film covers a period of approaching ten years – presumably one end of the 1980s to the other.  (Callum Slater is the toddler Jason and Joshua Millard-Lloyd his older incarnation; Jacob Tuton is the young boy Richard and Sam Plant the teenage version.)  I wasn’t sure how far into the future the minority of scenes involving Ray and Liz after their separation were meant to be taking place.  As with Richard and Jason, Billingham uses two pairs of actors to play his parents.  Unlike with the children, you don’t accept, at a realistic level, that Ella Smith would age into Deirdre Kelly or Justin Salinger into Patrick Romer.   Billingham maybe doesn’t intend that you should; it’s confusing nevertheless that Kelly looks only a few years older than Smith.  The cast also includes Tony Way (Lol), Sam Gittins (Will) and Richard Ashton (Sid).  Ray & Liz has drawn comparisons with the work of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh but some of the acting here is relatively primitive.  Billingham does get a very expressive and quietly convincing performance, though, from Joshua Millard-Lloyd.

    14 March 2019

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