It feels like Ben Is Back was afraid of losing viewers after the first hour of the movie. After opening as a film about how a family deals with a child with drug addiction and how addicts have to deal with the sins of their past, the movie pivots halfway, becoming a heist thriller completely unexpectedly. Ben Is Back never risks becoming unwatchable, but by amping up the plot the movie loses some of the message it is trying to get out there.
Holly Burns (Julia Roberts) appears to have a lovely suburban family with her new husband Neal (Courtney Vance). Holly and Neal have 2 kids together, and Julia has 2 from another marriage: Ivy (Kathryn Newton), the well adjusted daughter, and Ben (Lucas Hedges), sadly, a drug addict. On Christmas Eve out of the blue, Ben returns home from rehab, throwing the whole family into a Defcon 1 level panic, since this clearly has never gone well previously. Ben is equally saddened and unhappy by these new development, with Holly following him around at every turn. With each new setting Ben reexperiences, the threat grows of his past catching up with him, where a series of circumstances eventually lead to him and Holly frantically traipsing the seedy parts of the suburbs in hopes to get Ben’s wrongs fixed and remedied before Christmas day.
The first half of Peter Hedges’s movie is a study of how families deal with someone who has a drug addiction, giving us a host of examples. Holly is the optimist/delusional mother; all she wants to believe is that Ben is better and ready to come home. This plays well against Ivy, who has become jaded and guarded around Ben. Neal stands sort of in the middle, hesitant but supportive. The movie is at its best showing the assumptions made day to day that you cannot make when an addict is around. All the drugs around the house have to be hidden. Simple trips to the attic cannot be made because drugs were hidden up there; at an addict recovery meeting you could run into someone you dealt drugs too. Ben Is Back makes it seem like the disintegration of basic institutional family trust basically makes the road back to normalcy near impossible if you don’t reset the surroundings.
I thought Ben Is Back was going to stick to this intimate family study and become Oscar bait. To I think everyone’s surprise, the movie becomes a thriller about halfway through the movie. The change isn’t totally out of place: the message of the past coming back to haunt you is part of the first half of the movie. However, it’s as if Peter Hedges sensed audiences getting bored and thought he’d spice it up a little bit. This section of the movie really amps up the sadness ante, as the problem grows deeper and deeper. This is mostly an excuse for Julia Roberts to show how scared yet courageous she can be as Ben’s mom. And occasionally, we stumble upon something clever, like seeing grown up versions of childhood friends of Ben. However, the plot becomes more and more ludicrous, which makes me think some of the warnings issued in the first half Peter Hedges wanted to use for the ending, but he needed to get from point A to point B somehow, and came up with the entertaining but crazy second half of Ben Is Back.
Notice how the director and lead actor share the same name? That’s because Lucas Hedges is Peter’s son. Before you start screaming “nepotism,” Lucas has earned that role based on a really strong body of work the past few years. His body of work is better than his dad’s, who takes good premises and ruins them. Maybe he thought with Ben Is Back he could use some of his son’s good juju? Maybe he also though juju meant Julia Roberts clout. Hard to tell at this point…