Umm… sorry to all the perfectly sensible (and may I add oh-so-witty) Bens we know, for the unfortunate title of the movie…
“Hi, I’m Ben. I’m an addict…”
Ben is 19. He’s come home for Christmas, and the people who love him are terrified. He’s done this too many times before – promised he was clean, given loved ones false hope, gotten his girlfriends hooked, broken into his own home looking for things to steal so he can pay for his next high.
“I’m not worth it, Mom. …If you really knew me, you’d be done with me…”
Julia Roberts, who is so believable in the Mom-In-Difficult-Parenting-Situation Roles (anyone noticed the Pretty Woman jewelry box scene Easter Egg in Wonder?) you kinda don’t think she’s even acting anymore, portrays all the mixed emotions so powerfully that every mum can see themselves in her – the terror, the joy, the hope, the denial, the excuses when your kid does something stupid/ wrong, the refusal (and inability) to ever give up on them, the anger at everyone else for doubting… Don’t we all struggle perpetually to parent our kids? (AND I wouldn’t mind looking like Julia Roberts when I’m 50 😀 ) And so Holly Burns orders the organic cranberries because she wants to prepare the perfect meal, what with her son home from rehab. Everyone needs to fasten their seatbelts. The younger kids can get 15 more minutes of screen time.
Roberts of course took a break from acting when she had twins Phinnaeus and Hazel, now 14. She also has 11 year old Henry Daniel. And she relentlessly worked at convincing young upcoming actor Lucas Hedges and his writer-director father Peter Hedges to work together on the movie. In interviews, she will describe having the younger Hedges over for Thanksgiving and other big family events, to be around her own kids while they prepared to create Ben is Back together.
Ben Is Back is a drama meant to draw attention to the opioid epidemic, the terribly eye-opening horror story of the kind that can theoretically happen to “any” family. It is written with the voice of experience – Peter Hedges’ mother was an alcoholic who left the family and her son while he was still young… Grandma Hedges would return 15 years later, and spend the next ~25 years trying to save other addicts, herself never being completely free of her own demons.
Having also lost friends to drug addiction, Peter Hedges then wrote this story, which I view a clarion voice of caution, at the terrible toll addiction takes, the insidious way it finds its way in.
Betcha watch it anyway, but well, SPOILER ALERT…
This movie is rated R for language and drug use, and Common Sense Media unofficially places a 15+ age rating on it; personally I think it illustrates so powerfully the far-reaching consequences of substance abuse, the easy and unassuming way young people get caught unaware and sucked into those circumstances, down a path from which there is almost no chance of return, that anyone watching it cannot possibly think even an experimental high is anything but a stupid idea.
Because Ben, back this Christmas Eve, can never truly be back.
Ben has so eroded everyone’s trust in him that he can’t be left alone for even a second. Big, strapping, athletic, charming Ben who writes funny songs without reservation on the fly. At 19 years old, he can’t ever close the door to his room when he comes home.
“Just tell me son, where you want me to bury you…. “
His mother stays in the bathroom with him when he pees. She searches him before he closes the changing room door to try on the shirts she’s picked out, then frantically bangs on it when she thinks she hasn’t searched him thoroughly enough.
Oh, so you thought coming of age to say, smoke, drink or drive legally meant you were also “grown up enough” to use? Go read what I wrote above. I know someone (no longer in HK) whose parents used. And their grownup children, now with children of their own (which was how we met), told me “An addict will say anything to get their next hit.” (Well, don’t get me started about the people who aren’t addicts who will also say “anything” :D)
People in the department store watch as Ben finally opens the changing room door his mother is banging ceaselessly on, hands over the little packet of powder. But, but he had confiscated it from this girl at his last AA meeting – that’s why he had it with him! He was SAVING her!
“….My sponsor, he said, ‘Feeling really good about yourself are you, Ben? If you were honest, you would look in the mirror and say I Am A Great Big Phoney. …Because Ben, you are an addict. You are the last person who should believe his own bullsh*t…”
When I was young, I happened to come across an article written by a recovering young addict with a long history of substance abuse. She said that if you had never had a cigarette, you could never understand the terrible pull of an addiction. You will do anything, rationalise anything, just to feed that urge. Her words, the thought of never being able to feel as good again as if I had never tried it, frightened me deeply. It is the recovering addicts who deliver the most powerful lesson – I am yet to come across a recovering addict in an interview who does not regret ever starting.
I have also never come across anyone who did anything resulting in say, getting hooked or being in some accident, and then said “I knew I was going to end up hooked/ in that accident from doing (that stupid thing)!” Everyone always thinks that wasn’t going to happen to them and that’s why they did it. (…AND THEN THEY WERE WRONG 😀 ) The movie shows you as much – just when Ben’s feeling good about himself, having recovered the family’s stolen dog and thereby also “saved” his siblings’ and family’s Christmas, gotten away from his drug dealer friends, managed to settle his debts with them…… that’s when he thinks It Can’t Hurt. One of the things Peter Hedges talks about in interviews is the number of former addicts who backslide right when they think they’re now in a good place.
This is not a movie that teaches kids how to take drugs, and nowhere is there one of those rather irresponsible night clubbing scenes that shows people having just the best time with the lights and the music and the supposedly heightened fun experience. This movie shows unreservedly what happens long after that first high. It shows how no matter how hard Ben tries, no matter how many people who love him try to pull him out of it, he cannot escape. An hour of “fun” which you can barely remember anyway, a lifetime of suffering which you can.
“I TOLD you not to believe me (Mom), and you didn’t listen…”
Ben was not saving her. That girl in the meeting who just wanted to get high one last time. An hour after he got home, he got the packet out of the stash he keeps hidden above his younger siblings’ bedroom. He has 3 younger siblings who adore him, the eldest of whom is beautiful, bright, capable, has a powerful singing voice – and knows never to trust him.
Ben gets a former girlfriend hooked, by convincing her “getting high feels so good.” Maggie dies of overdose. Just like Ben would’ve if Ponce, the family’s adopted rescue mutt, hadn’t kept licking his face to keep him awake.
You will watch Ben’s mother face Maggie’s mother in church. You will watch Maggie’s father living alone in low-cost subsidised housing, smash the family car window trying to get at Ben, when he recognises their car outside. You will watch Maggie’s mother lend Ben’s mother her car after Ben drives off leaving her stranded, also teaching Ben’s mother how to administer the treatments needed to revive him when she eventually does find him.
Ben’s mother blames his doctor. She thinks it was too many painkillers after that snowboarding accident, when Ben was 14. The doctor doesn’t even remember Ben, let alone remember prescribing “too many”.
Ponce is gone. Coming back from Christmas Eve service, Ben’s family finds their home burgled, their beloved rescue mutt missing. His “friends” know he’s home. They won’t let him stay clean.
“You don’t understand, Mom. There are so many, many people it could be…”
“Then we’ll just have to take it one @sshole at a time..”
“(warmly, kindly) Ben! It’s about time!” It’s a warm, inviting doorstep, cheerily decorated for the holiday season.
Ben shies away. “I just want to know if you have my dog…”
Back in the car, Ben’s mother is relentless. She knows that face. She’s seen the man with the kind face often… somewhere. And so Ben finally tells her that’s Mr Richmond who used to teach History.
(Doctor, teacher however, is not the point. The point is “there are so many, many people it could be…” It could be anyone. It could be anywhere. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And so there must not be a will. I feel many young people take things too far at least partly because they aren’t shown clearly enough where that path can lead.…
I grew up with Malaysia and Singapore carrying the death penalty for drug trafficking.. Interspersed with regular prime time family programs in Malaysia back in the day were the anti-drugs ads, and while I can only vaguely remember they had these tables of how many grams heroin vs cocaine etc etc, would get you which heavy penalties, one of the things burned into my memory was the footage they show of the shivering addicts going cold turkey in the rehab centres. Never the lights and the music and the smoke patterns, it was the shivering addicts… Kinda like the warnings and graphic pictures of throat and lung cancers that are legally required to be printed on cigarette packets today…
“There is no high anymore, I just don’t want to be sick…”
Ben’s mother can hardly recognise his childhood friend Spencer, now weaselly and shaking, body racked with withdrawal. Eventually the only way to get anything out of him as to Ben’s whereabouts is to give him the packet she took from Ben in the changing room.
“Your mother and I were friends. I changed your diaper. This is so F*CK-ed.”
