Review: Boy Erased

Boy Erased (15)

USA 2018  115 mins  Dir: Joel Edgerton  Cast: Lucas Hedges, Nicole Kidman, Joel Edgerton, Russell Crowe, Xavier Dolan, Flea

The gay conversion therapy drama is well on the way to becoming a mini-genre of its very own. Hard on the heels of last year’s indie flick The Miseducation of Cameron Post comes Joel Edgerton’s starrier adaptation of Garrard Conley’s 2015 memoir of the same title, which was positioned as a big awards season release but came away mostly empty handed. The storyline hits all the expected beats: daft Christian packs homosexual offspring off to sinister gay conversion camp run by tyrannical closeted god-botherers with no psychiatric qualifications, who succeed only in causing harm. Rather than giving these ‘therapists’ the twin barrels they thoroughly deserve, Edgerton opts for a solemnly even-handed approach that fools nobody because we all know where his liberal sympathies lie in this slow, gloomy (hey, would somebody switch the lights on just occasionally?) drama, weighed down with an especially dreary indie score.

When we see smug, bespectacled Arkansas car dealer and Baptist pastor Marshall Eamons (Crowe) telling his flock how proud he is of his “fine, upstanding, honest” son Jared (Hedges, who played the gay kid in Lady Bird), we know we can be only minutes away from the poor lad’s terrible secret being revealed. Actually, it’s not clear at first whether he is definitively queer, though his inability to get a stiffy when the local hottie attempts to coax him into action rather suggests his carnal interests may lie elsewhere. So off he’s dispatched to the inaptly named Love In Action camp – a kind of fun-free Butlins, where all the good things in life (porn, drugs, alcohol, TV, masturbation, etc) are banned. It’s run by didactic, self-appointed de-gayer Victor Sykes (a suspicicously mustachioed Edgerton), whose team includes a sin-purged martinet specialising in lectures on maniliness (played by Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers). Mum Nancy (Kidman, retrieving a blonde Bible Belt wig from the dressing-up box this time) accompanies Jared, who’s enrolled as a day boarder for an initial 12-day assessement and spends his nights at a local hotel.

At first, the ‘therapy’ consists of telling gay youths (and a token lesbian) that their behaviour is learned rather than innate, and can be successfully prayed away. They’re each instructed to draw up a ‘Moral Inventory’ of past sins, which sparks traumatic memories in Jared. It’s not long before recidivists are being literally bashed with Bibles – with predictably tragic consequences.

Edgerton chooses to tell the whole thing in villain-free shades of grey, assisted by suitably nuanced performances from his cast. Sykes may be a clueless idiot peddling dangerous lies, but he’s sincere in his beliefs. (An end credit informs us that the person on whom the character is based now lives with his husband.) Nancy is a conflicted mother torn between her religion and love for her son. Even Marshall is an essentially honourable man and loving father motivated by a desire to do the right thing as dictated by his religious advisors. Indeed, the only unambiguously unpleasant character is the gay youth who outs Jared, which some may find troublesome. The intention, presumably, is to draw in fundamentalist US Christian audiences who may be struggling with these issues. Good luck with that. Anyone seeking a more entertaining spin on the subject should seek out the campy 1999 satire But I’m a Cheerleader, which was panned on release but has undergone a reassessment in recent years.