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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