BEN IS BACK: An Ill-Conceived Flop

You’ll be forgiven if you forgot about Ben is Back. The preceding months already brought us the father/son addiction drama Beautiful Boy and the Lucas Hedges-starring conversion camp movie Boy Erased, the amalgamation of which is pretty close to this film. Hedges as the titular Ben is trying to kick an addiction with the help of his ferocious mom? Haven’t we seen that already?

Despite the similarities, there should be plenty of room for all three films to distinguish themselves. The complexities of what they’re addressing gives them plenty of angles for approach, and given the talent pool to draw from, they should have been able to find different stars. Unfortunately, none of them did that, and their collective mediocrity means they’re destined to form an indistinct blob stuck on the end of 2018.

If any of the three are going to separate themselves, it’ll probably be Ben is Back, but not for the reasons you want. The film is a much more obvious misfire, one that seemingly couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a sincere family drama or a crime thriller.

Eye On A Worthy Prize

Writer and director Peter Hedges peppers Ben is Back with so many moments of on the nose messaging that it’s clear he’s trying to make a point about the opioid epidemic in America, specifically attempting to humanize the issue by focusing on a single family caught in its grasp. He achieves some moderate success with this, finding small moments that the cast is able to make pop as bits of pathos.

Lucas as a young man on leave from rehab for Christmas and Julia Roberts as his supportive but out of her element mother carry much of the emotional weight of the film. They are the two characters that still hold out hope for recovery while the rest of the family has learned to keep their distance, and those contrasting relationships make the bond between mother and son all the more affecting. The moments they share range from ecstatic joy to pits of despair, and how they navigate those shifts, particularly when they happen very suddenly, makes for some riveting scenes.

Roberts is a known quantity at this point, and she brings the usual effusiveness that makes her characters so easy to connect with. That also means she tends to play things a bit big, leaving Lucas to pitch his performance to her level. Luckily he’s proven to be a pretty big performer himself, so he’s able to match Roberts well enough to stave off accusations of nepotism (Peter is Lucas’ father).

However, their acting style does make the didactic moments Peter wrote stick out all the more. The constant hints about how far Lucas’ character has fallen and how helpless they all were to prevent it is a timely and empathetic message, but these moments land with a clunk thanks to how heavy-handed the film is at presenting them.

Two Halves Don’t Make a Whole

Unfortunately, there’s far more wrong with this script than its overly earnest approach. What starts out as a small family drama takes a sudden turn into thriller territory, and those two parts never mix well.

Think about it this way: you spend the first half of this film exploring how each member of the family relates to Ben after years of second chances and regrets have piled up. These are complicated relationships that take time to sort out, and everything from the airy pacing to the handheld camerawork tells you that the film is interested in intimately exploring this family. How would you feel, then, if the film suddenly isolates two characters and sends them on a wild goose chase across town? If you’re like me, then you’ll feel confused and quickly start longing to finish the promising setup, but this film never circles back around to do that.

Instead, it layers on clichés and shortcuts, building on the worst aspects of the film’s first half to finish with a deadening thud. The coincidences and incongruous behavior becomes laughable, and ultimately the plot manipulations become just that: manipulations, and cheap ones at that. To say that this film gets worse as it goes on is an understatement. It falls flat on its face.

Betraying Its Message

The ill-conceived back half of this film not only derails the narrative, it also undoes the empathetic message it’s trying to get across. The goose chase takes mother and son through all of Ben’s old haunts, which are, of course, increasingly riddled with grotesqueries. If the film is attempting to humanize addiction, then it probably shouldn’t descend into textbook imagery of dumpsterside brawls and back alley living, essentially reinforcing the idea that addicts live in a separate, dangerous world.

This is, in fact, the way film has portrayed many groups that society deemed as outcasts over the years, and this representation never helped anyone. Quite to the contrary, it reinforces an otherness and equates groups of people with crime and fear. The damage from this can vary. If numerous films are doing it, then it can influence cultural perception and create a toxic view by society at large towards outcast groups (in this case addicts). On the scale of an individual film, audience members will likely feel alienated from the characters who are addicts, or even worse, may turn on them entirely.

Either way, the structure of the ending betrays the fact that none of this was not the intent of Ben Is Back. It assumes we are still rooting for Ben, but if anything, the film has moved us further away from him. And that is the worst way this movie could have failed.

Conclusion: Ben Is Back

With its heart in the right place, Ben Is Back attempts to look at how the opioid crisis has invaded all levels of American society. Unfortunately, the ill-conceived story does just the opposite, creating a seedy, underground world that the uninitiated can never comprehend.

Did you find a meaningful takeaway from Ben Is Back or did you get pushed away like me? Let us know in the comments!

Ben Is Back is released in the US on December 7th, 2018.