Review: Ben is Back
Ben is Back is a 2018 film starring Hollywood icon Julia Roberts and emerging character actor, Lucas Hedges. The film depicts one 24 hour period in which Hedges’s Ben, a recovering drug addict, returns from rehab to join his family, headed by his mother (Roberts) for Christmas.
The film is dark and claustrophobic. If you are looking for a bit of sunny escapism from our current predicament, this isn’t it. But if you are up for it, Ben is Back is remarkably moving, despair inducing and pulls no punches in highlighting the cruel human ramifications of America’s well-covered opioid epidemic.
The film’s narrative direction kicks off when Ben and his mother visit the local shopping mall and run into the doctor that first prescribed Ben a highly addictive opioid based pain-killer following a snowboarding accident. Roberts quietly scolds the doctor, now riddled with dementia, as her son watches on. Her anger is palpable, her grief at what that doctor’s relatively routine decision has cost both herself and her son is etched across Robert’s familiar face.
The film eventually settles into what can only be described as a horrifying search for a valuable item one of Ben’s former drug associates has stolen from the family home as a ransom to force him to do their bidding (in this case drug running). Roberts insists on accompanying her son, gaining an unfiltered view in to the horrors of drug addiction.
She vomits when realising Ben had been trading sexual favours with one of his teachers for access to drugs. She is horrified at the state of one of Ben’s childhood friends who has also fallen into addiction. Violence lurks at every turn and the sense that not just addiction, but the economic and social ecosystem that supports and surrounds it, is inescapable is rendered chillingly.
The film also effectively portrays the way in which Ben’s addiction impacts upon the other members of his family; his sister doesn’t want to give him another chance having been scorned too many times, his step-father worries, ultimately appropriately, what unsavoury characters his return will bring into the house to endanger the rest of the family. These tensions come to head in Roberts' character, a burden of performance Roberts shoulders exceptionally well, but one under which her character at times, understandably, falters.
Ultimately, if the film has a message through all that darkness, it’s that you can never give up on those you love.