"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Friday, April 19, 2019

Boy Erased (2018, R)


This was actually another movie I saw before the Oscars, but I was putting up so many movie reviews in January and February that I decided to leave off writing it up until now.  (To be honest, after I started watching, I remembered that I’d also wanted to see The Miseducation of Cameron Post, and once I’d seen both, I decided to just write up one conversion-therapy-themed movie before the Oscars.)  I did find it interesting, though, so I wanted to come back around to it.

Based on a true story, Boy Erased follows Jared, a college freshman who’s pulled out of school and sent to conversion therapy by his Baptist preacher father.  Jared, who’s struggled for a long time with his feelings for other men, initially takes to the program with gusto, but as time goes on, he increasingly begins to feel it doesn’t have his best interests at heart.

I mentioned in my Cameron Post review that I’ve now seen three movies about conversion therapy (the other being But I’m a Cheerleader,) and of the three, this is the one that most typically falls under the “LGBTQ prestige drama” category.  By that, I mean a) there’s a lot of suffering and b) it feels made more for straight people than LGBTQ people.  For references, other films I’d put in this category would include Brokeback Mountain and The Danish Girl.  This doesn’t immediately render it a bad film, but it does hold the story slightly at a distance, as if it’s operating under the assumption that this character is not like you and it’s asking you to sympathize with his plight.

This can lead to some teeth-gnashy scenes, especially where Sykes (the program leader) and Jared’s dad are concerned.  I don’t doubt that these depictions are reasonably accurate, but they do give off a slightly self-conscious For Your Consideration vibe to me.  One way, though, that the film’s vantage point works better for me is in how it shows the evolving stance of Jared’s mother.  It’s of course very easy to say, “What sort of mother would send her son to a program like that?”, but when someone has likely been cocooned their entire lives in a community that consistently views being gay as a sin/affliction, I can at least conceive of how she as first thinks of this move as a loving act (or at least tells herself to listen to the much louder voices saying so.)  Cutting through decades of rhetoric has to be a difficult thing, but as Jared starts becoming disillusioned with the program, his mother’s changing feelings aren’t terribly far behind his.

Even though each conversion-therapy movie I’ve seen has a different style and feel to it, and each is about a different program (and this is the only one based on a true story of the real program behind it,) it’s interesting to see similar elements crop up in the “therapy” of all three.  Here, we see a preoccupation with gender roles and presentation – the idea that if you act like a “real man” (i.e., conventionally masculine,) your heart and mind will soon follow suit – and an obsession with looking at the teens’ past/family history to find the “cause” of their same-sex attraction.  I also like the touches about how shoddily put-together such psychologically-impactful programming is, like Jared’s comment about the curriculum being riddled with spelling errors, as well as the creepy “first rule of Fight Club” insistence that the kids not tell their parents anything about the therapy. 

All the acting is effective.  Lucas Hedges is sympathetic and affecting as Jared, and I really enjoy Nicole Kidman’s performance as his mom.  While, again, I think Sykes and Jared’s dad are both overwritten at times, Joel Edgerton and Russell Crowe do their due diligence in the roles.  I also like the actors playing the other participants – their stories are mostly just hinted at in the background, but I get a feel for their individual experiences even though there’s not a ton of focus on them.

Warnings

Strong thematic elements, language (including homophobic slurs,) sexual content, and violence (including rape.)

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