Julia Roberts pulls out all the stops in a career high performance—one that reminds us how much empathy we can have for an actor we hold dear—in Ben is Back, a searing look at the bond between a mother and son over 24-hours of escalating, addiction-related anxiety.
Picture opens on Christmas Eve in an upstate New York enclave where wife and mother Holly Burns (Roberts) hurriedly prepares holiday festivities, which include managing two spirited youngsters, preparing for the church pageant and the expected flurry of holiday minutiae, all of which are interrupted by the arrival of a surprise, and not altogether welcome, guest.
That guest is Holly’s troubled, nineteen-year-old son Ben (Lucas Hedges), a former druggie who has done stints in rehab, ruined the last two family Christmases and whose sudden arrival—77 days clean after a near-fatal overdose—is met, to put it mildly, with conflicting emotions. While Ben professes that his sponsor has given him permission to spend Christmas day at home, cautious Holly is at once overjoyed and deeply concerned, promptly hiding her jewelry and medications in a frantic effort to eliminate temptations.
Ben’s arrival is less welcome by Holly’s second husband, Neal, well-played by Courtney B. Vance, who has taken on the financial exposure of Ben’s treatments. Eschewing Christmas sentiment, he insists the teen return, posthaste, to his clinic. But even Neal can’t deny the kid compassion on Christmas, going along with Holly’s offer of conditional reprieve—Ben can stay through Christmas, but she’ll never let him out of her sight. Even a backyard romp with his young siblings or a simple trip to the bathroom is monitored. Drug tests are administered and passed. And Ben’s sister, Ivy (a terrific Kathryn Newton), who projects cynicism upon his return, clearly misses her brother deeply.
Spouting tales of strides made in treatment, Ben pledges that he’s clean, even taking Holly to an addicts’ meeting. But as Ben himself tells Holly and us—never trust an addict. Keeping Ben in her sights proves a challenge on a mother-son trip to the local shopping mall (where a chance meeting allows Holly to deliver a blunt death-wish to the small-town doctor who got Ben hooked on painkillers), and it isn’t long before his old druggie network, and its temptations, rears its ugly head.
Ben is also nursing a world of guilt over the death of a former friend, and whose overdose has devastated her now-divorced parents. Dear Evan Hansen Tony-winner Rachel Bay Jones plays the girl’s distraught mother who in two scenes, including a marvelously understated run-in at a Christmas Eve church service, punches through with sad resignation.
So far, so very good, and writer-director Peter Hedges (Lucas’ father, and helmer of 2003’s Pieces of April) creates a finely tuned, believably shell-shocked family and a palpable guilt coursing through the architect of its chaos. And that chaos shatters their Christmas Eve after the family discovers that vandals have broken into their home and stolen their beloved dog.
Ben surmises that the pet has been pilfered by a higher-up drug dealer with a nasty grudge, and it’s here that the picture shifts from family dynamics to rabbit hole odyssey. And this all-night search, for Holly, becomes progressively darker to encompass sad, sometimes sordid revelations about the son she somehow lost.
As a filmmaker, Hedges has an uncanny knack for drawing us into the emotions of his two terrific leads. Roberts, who reminds us here what dramatic reserves she possesses, leaves nothing on the table. Over the course of the film’s 24 hours there isn’t an emotion she doesn’t tear though, whether accepting uncomfortable advice from Bay Jones, marching Hedges to the cemetery, cruising around terrible, unsafe neighborhoods in the middle of the night or pleading with police to find and arrest her son, it’s one of the most nakedly emotional portraits of the year.
Hedges, the ubiquitous young star of such pedigreed movies as Manchester by the Sea, Lady Bird, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and this season’s fine Boy Erased, also currently lighting up Broadway opposite Elaine May in Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery, captures Ben’s struggle to free himself from the shackles of his disease and heal his family in the process with a mature emotional acuity, and vulnerability, not typical for young male stars.
Ben is Back ends on a sobering note. I’ve always appreciated pictures about parents who go the mat for their children—George C. Scott in Hardcore, Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer, even Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness—and Julia Roberts’ final scene here ranks with the all-timers.
3 1/2 stars.
