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BOY ERASED
Director: Joel Edgerton Cast: Lucas Hedges, Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, Joel Edgerton, Britton Sear, Xavier Dolan, Troye Sivan, Joe Alwyn, Flea, Jesse LaTourette, Théodore Pellerin, Cherry Jones, Madelyn Cline MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:55 Release Date: 11/2/18 (limited); 11/21/18 (wide) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 22, 2018 The protagonist of Boy Erased really doesn't have a voice in his own story until the movie's epilogue. This is, in part, the point of writer/director Joel Edgerton's sophomore feature, an adaptation of Garrard Conley's memoir about his time at a facility that practiced what has come to be known as conversion therapy. It's junk "science," for those who may not know about it, in which religion and phony psychoanalysis are used in misguided—and potentially dangerous—attempts to "cure" what the people behind such endeavors mostly refer to as "same-sex attraction." Since such programs were and—at this time, in 36 states in the U.S.—still are aimed mostly at religious people, there's something particularly cruel about them. People's faith is essentially weaponized against themselves, as people who still might believe in the religious dogma and want to remain true to it, and among family members, who fear what such "sins" could bring to their loved one. The process itself is central to Edgerton's screenplay, which uses the steps of the program itself as a means to reveal the scant pieces of biographical and character information that we learn about the protagonist. Mostly, though, Jared (Lucas Hedges), as the Conley stand-in is called here, is silent—listening and barely reacting as others try to determine his immediate fate and what will happen to him in the foreseeable future. He's a target of his minister father's disappointment, the cause of his mother's conflicted feelings about her religious devotion and her loving devotion to her son, and a pawn in this warped so-called therapy, which looks mostly like abuse and, at times, feels like a scam that's rooted in something far more base than some moral or religious motivation. Basically, it looks like people leeching off of the fears and misdirected love of others in order to make money. In other words, Edgerton's intentions are pure, especially if one takes the recitation of statistics during the movie's coda as a kind of ethical and moral purity. The movie's primary purpose is to raise awareness of what happens in and what could happen to the participants within such programs. Despite a few flashbacks that give Jared a specific past that has led him to this particular facility, he is just another sad, conflicted, and anguished face among the crowd of other victims like himself. He doesn't have a voice, because everyone else is speaking for him. There's the passive way in which his sexuality becomes a topic of discussion. Jared is brought to this conversion facility after he's outed by a fellow college student under especially despicable circumstances (The other student rapes Jared in his dorm room and, to avoid being accused, calls Jared's parents). There's Jared's father Marshall (Russell Crowe), a Baptist minister, who listens to another pastor and a man whose own son attended such a program. There's his mother Nancy (Nicole Kidman), who goes along with this decision and accompanies her son, staying at a local hotel while Jared spends his days in "therapy." Once in the program, there's Victor Sykes (Edgerton) doing most of the talking. He's a pastor and self-proclaimed counselor who believes that same-sex attraction is a choice, caused by learned behaviors. It's akin to an addiction in his mind, and there's much discussion about anger and taking moral inventory—but little by way of actually understanding how anyone would think such a process could work. That might be a virtue of Edgerton's script, which looks upon this process with such skepticism that the movie doesn't even bother an attempt to explain it. Instead, the story gives us scene after scene of terrible, painful, and dehumanizing accusations, confrontations, and rhetoric. Jared goes along with charade at first, for reasons that we must infer. They seem to be a combination of faith and family. Like so much else about the specifics of the character, they're mostly left an open question, and as well as Hedges communicates the mostly silent suffering here, the character himself is undone by too many questions. As the rhetoric becomes more personal and the tactics become more violent (One sequence—of family members and other patients holding a mock funeral for one young man and proceeding to beat him with a Bible—is particularly chilling), Jared comes to realize that no good can come of this program. In a way, then, the story is about this young man finding his voice, and once he does, the movie itself comes to life with tension and an actual attention to these characters. Each of the parents has at least one scene in which they can be honest with Jared, and the movie's final scene, in which the father and the son finally say what has needed to be said for a long time, is quite affecting. It's far too long of a wait for such specificity, though. Boy Erased operates primarily as a message movie, and as necessary as that message might be, the movie's lack of a unique and personal approach to the material means that it's not a necessary part of the conversation. Copyright © 2018 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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sexual content including an assault, some language and brief drug use)
