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
