by Eric Blume
In writer-director Peter Hedges’ new film Ben is Back, Julia Roberts and Lucas Hedges perform a heart-rending duet. They’re so locked into their characters, with their lived-in emotions so close to the skin, that they make the film soar.
Young Ben (Hedges) returns home for Christmas, 77 days clean from sober living from his drug addiction, to the joy and hope of his mom (Roberts), and the skepticism of his family. While the plot is straightforward, Peter Hedges takes the peace out of the domestic setting in the second half of the film, where he has his two main characters on the road facing various elements from Ben’s past...
This last hour, while punching some semi-forced beats, drums up a ratcheting amount of tension, and allows larger themes and ideas to unfold. The film is ultimately about loving someone despite finding out every single appalling detail about them, and Hedges and his actors avoid sentimentalizing that theme or presenting the mother’s heroism in a trite or commercial way. Roberts clocks her deepening revelations of her son with a complex wave of acceptance, disgust, and fear… but never disbelief. All of the things she feared might be true become reality in front of her eyes, but we can see that it’s oddly bringing them closer together rather than driving them apart. There’s zero coyness in Ben is Back, and it allows Roberts and Hedges to cut straight to the heart of their bond.
This film also gets right an astonishing amount of detail. Every actor gets to play every scene with a full history of past events front and center, while in the immediacy of the moment. Each character comes in loaded with a full life behind them (you know, just like real life). A particularly nice touch is writing a wider nuclear family: Roberts’ character is remarried (to Courtney B. Vance), Ben has a slightly younger sister from the first marriage (Kathryn Newton, also excellent), but two very young half-siblings from the new marriage. Hedges calibrates these actors to have different amounts of distance (or lack of it) to Ben: it’s a leap ahead for him as a director.
Ben is Back delivers a true two-hander. What Roberts and Lucas Hedges do here borders on the astonishing. They’ve developed that complicated mother-son dynamic where you’re most harsh and awful to the person who treats you the best, and who you loves the most. The connection between these actors crackles with electricity, they keep the stakes high, and they guard each other from going soft.
Hedges gave a terrific performance two years ago in Manchester by the Sea, where he smartly played contrary to his dialogue: despite what his character was saying and doing, Hedges was always, always playing the pain and anger of being unwanted. He performs a similar miracle here: his Ben talks about making everything right, but underneath he really wants to die. The pain he’s inflicted on everyone around him makes life unbearable. But there’s no maudlin energy in this performance: he finds surprises and subtleties in the addict journey that make everything specific to Ben. And he goes toe-to-toe with Roberts, no easy feat when she’s doing possibly the best work of her career.
When Roberts has a role that’s great for her, one that calls upon her incredible access to her emotions and her ability to drive a story emotionally, she’s unbeatable. It’s easy to criticize Roberts, as she perhaps doesn’t have the versatility we credit to some of the cinema’s great actresses, but she also has what many actresses don’t have, which is an uncanny connection to the camera, and a natural screen magnetism that’s virtually unmatched. Roberts comes to every scene in Ben is Back with a colossal amount of force: every fiber in her seems infused with investment. She enters each moment with Ben as a negotiation, like most mother-teen relationships, but burdened with the specific details of their past. She knows she’s can’t win but never stops trying. Roberts gets to scale big heights here: not just from start to finish, but often within scenes.
If Roadside Attractions can get enough people to see this film over the next month, Roberts could very likely be the “surprise” Best Actress nominee. She and Lucas Hedges connect powerfully to each other, and their dance is intensely moving. There’s no gooey center for this pair: just two people laying themselves bare, and looking honestly and painfully at each other, with nowhere to hide.