Ben Is Back review: Julia Roberts gives one of her strongest and most moving performances

Dir: Peter Hedges. Starring: Julia Roberts, Lucas Hedges, Courtney B Vance, Kathryn Newton, Rachel Bay Jones. Cert 15, 103 mins

Ben Is Back sounds from its title as if it is going to be a goofy comedy or an exploitation picture, perhaps about the return of a slasher. In fact, this is a very dark family melodrama. The horror here is America’s ongoing opioid epidemic. Julia Roberts gives one of her strongest and most moving performances as a mother who goes to extreme lengths to protect her recovering drug addict son. The film, which takes place over the course of a single day, covers similar territory to Felix van Groeningen’s recent Beautiful Boy, but in a more intense and telescoped way.

It’s Christmas. Holly Burns (Julia Roberts), her husband Neal (Courtney B Vance) and their children are preparing for the festivities. The film begins in deceptively gentle fashion with Christmas carol singing in church and children dressed up in nativity costumes. Then, as Holly drives the children home on a snowy afternoon, a figure appears as if from nowhere in the middle of the road. This is 19-year-old Ben Burns (played by Lucas Hedges, the director’s son). He is a pale, ghostly figure. Ben is home for Christmas, claiming that he has been given permission to come out of rehab.

The filmmakers capture the extreme ambivalence the rest of the family feels about Ben’s unexpected arrival. His mum is delighted to see him and deludes herself that he “has got the sparkle back” in his eyes and has put on weight after 77 days without drugs. His sister Ivy is far more wary and his stepfather Neal is openly hostile. Everyone knows that he shouldn’t really be there.

Ben Is Back is cleverly scripted. At the moments you expect the storytelling to become slushy and lachrymose, it will turn very harsh indeed. Writer-director Peter Hedges uses conventions from the family-in-peril drama. Tension mounts as we wait either for Ben to do damage to himself or to wreak more havoc on the lives of those closest to him.

Perspectives on Ben are shifting all the time. He is charming, sensitive and very good at entertaining his younger half-siblings but he is also a malevolent, deceitful and very destructive presence. The other family members loathe him as much as they love him and they blame him as much as they pity him. He has continually let them down before. They expect him to do so again. They warn him it’s not in his best interests to be at home. There are “too many triggers” that might make him relapse. His stepfather, who has remortgaged the house to pay for his rehab, points out that if Ben were black, he’d “be in jail by now”. Race isn’t a major theme of the film, but the stepfather, who is black himself, can’t help but notice the double standards in a society in which young, white, middle-class addicts with wealthy parents keep on getting second chances. He is jealous, too, of the way that Ben steals away his wife’s attention.

Lucas Hedges (fresh from playing the tormented gay Christian adolescent in Boy Erased) brings a double-edged quality to his role as the recovering addict. He is a consummate con artist and liar whose actions have ruined or cost the lives of others. From scene to scene, it is impossible to tell when he is being sincere and when he is exploiting his family’s credulity. At the same time, he really is a victim. His addiction began when the friendly local doctor, now suffering from dementia, prescribed him what he claimed were harmless painkillers to clear up a sports injury. Ben became hooked – and it wasn’t his fault.

The film could easily have become a terrible dirge with the long-suffering parent giving in to self-pity as her son heads yet again towards the reefs. Instead, Roberts plays Holly as a fighter who redoubles her efforts every time Ben strays and who never dwells on the past. She simply won’t give up. “You’re trying too hard,” she is told. “That’s what I do,” she replies.

The ironies mount as Ben rages against his own mother for being stupid enough to believe what he tells her. He tries to be honest about his own duplicity but can’t always manage it. The filmmakers don’t gloss over the degradation and humiliation he endures. Whenever he is off screen for a few minutes, you fear that the next time you see him will be upside down with a needle in his arm.

For all its candour about the squalor of addiction and rehab, the film has some very contrived moments. Many involve the pet dog, Ponce, a shaggy little mongrel whose wellbeing matters as much to the Burns family as that of Ben himself. There are also heavy-handed Dickensian-like moments in which Holly will encounter vagrants and drug addicts and remember what they used to be like as doe-eyed little children.

The film’s producer, Nina Jacobson, also oversaw the Diary of a Wimpy Kid film series. Those were cheery, child-friendly movies about a family not so far removed from the one portrayed here. That is the point. Thanks to the opioid epidemic, movies about addiction are changing. Instead of films like Christiane F and The Man with the Golden Arm in which the protagonists are on the margins of society, we get such stories now set in the heart of middle-class suburbia.

Ben Is Back spends so long emphasising the bleak prospects facing its young addict anti-hero that any attempts to graft on a conventional happy ending are bound to feel fake. The dilemma facing the filmmakers is that they want to be as honest as possible without turning the movie into an enormous downer. You can hardly blame them if they do end up sugarcoating their material. The alternative would have been too grim to contemplate.