Ben Is Back (2018)

Liz and I appreciated the excellence of this sad story of a teenage addict and his family, though it's hard to take. Julia Roberts (last blogged for Money Monster) is terrific as Holly, the mom who is thrilled to see her son show up on Christmas Eve. Lucas Hedges (most recently in these pages for Boy Erased) matches Roberts' star power in the title role, and the main cast is rounded out by wonderful performances by Kathryn Newton (last blogged for Blockers) as Ben's wary sister Ivy (Holly named her daughter Ivy? Really? Not a fan of that gag) and Courtney B. Vance (first came to my attention in The Last Supper (1995) and I've seen him in The Preacher's Wife (1996), Cookie's Fortune (1999), Space Cowboys (2000), four episodes of Revenge (2012), three of Masters of Sex (2014), one of Scandal (2015), eleven of American Crime Story (2016) as Johnnie Cochran, and the narrator of Isle of Dogs) as Holly's realistic husband Neal, the father of Ben's young half-siblings who adore him unconditionally.

Director/writer Peter Hedges made his feature debut writing the screenplay adapted from his own novel of What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), he was Oscar nominated for co-writing the adaptation of Nick Hornby's novel for About a Boy (2002), then he directed and wrote Pieces of April (2003), then directed and co-wrote Dan in Real Life (2007). I loved all of those. The next project of his that I saw was all 27 episodes of the series About a Boy (2014-15), which he wrote. Apparently it took some convincing for his son Lucas, already a bigger star than the dad, to play Ben.

There are obvious similarities to Beautiful Boy, which is based on memoirs of the father and son. This one, however, is an original story.

The nice exterior shots of upstate New York are brought to us by cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh (after I wrote about him in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty he shot several more, including Gifted).

As I write I'm streaming the eerie/pretty soundtrack by Dickon Hinchcliffe (just blogged for Leave No Trace) on Apple Music (it's also available on Spotify).

I'm going to take a wild guess that Rotten Tomatoes' critics, averaging 79%, and its audiences at 76, also found the subject matter a little too difficult. I think it's worth seeing, still on a few big screens now, and available digitally in your home in March 2019.