Mark Reviews Movies: THE MISEDUCATION OF CAMERON POST

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 16, 2018

It would be incredibly easy for The Miseducation of Cameron Post to focus on the negative. There's little, if anything, that's obviously positive about the situation in which the eponymous protagonist finds herself. After being caught in the backseat of a car with her best friend/secret girlfriend, Cameron (Chloë Grace Moretz) is forced to attend a so-called "gay conversion" camp run by evangelical Christians, who are convinced that same-sex attraction is not only a choice but also a sin, an illness, and the consequence of subconscious forces that need to be uncovered and quashed.

There's no rhyme or reason to the camp's pseudo-psychological methods. The wiser of the attendees know it, and they've discovered patterns of thought that can be exploited. Most of these theories are contradictory. According to the thinking of the camp's personnel, a person's relationship with his or her parents is key to figuring out the source of being gay, lesbian, or bisexual, but receiving too much or not enough affection from one's parents is treated equally as a "cause." One would imagine that completely different actions would have completely different consequences. That's not the case in the minds of the camp's facilitators.

Anything and everything could be a reason. It's the result that matters to these people.

The film sees this process for what it is and, eventually, calls it out as such: abuse. Is there anything good to be found in a place such as this, where one's nature is assaulted with imprecise psycho-babble in a targeted effort to turn a person into someone he or she is not? Co-writer/director Desiree Akhavan clearly thinks that there is, but the answer has little to do with the camp, its workers, or its goals. Adapting Emily M. Danforth's novel, Akhavan and co-screenwriter Cecilia Frugiuele see life in this place as a sort of necessary evil. The evil is in its procedures. The necessity comes from its attendees, who have to find some way to survive this abuse.

Luckily, they have each other. Arguably, that's the only side of this place that's a positive for the teenagers who are forced to be here. It's an accidental byproduct of the camp's design: If you put a bunch of social outcasts and religious pariahs in one place, it's inevitable that at least some of them will realize they have more in common with each other than with the opinion of what they "should" be like within 1993 society and their religion. Placing them in an isolated environment, while giving them a cause against which to rally, only serves to solidify those connections.

The result, then, is that Akhavan has given us a film about a dire situation that finds hope in its chance connections, its little moments of rebellion, and, ultimately, in the understanding that people who are seen as "different" can find solace in their similarities. This story could have been a simple, straightforward attack on "gay conversion" and its advocates. Instead, it's a compassionate story about friendships and being an outsider, and it even has room for some compassion toward the ultimate outsiders in this scenario—the people who are trying to change the central characters' way of being.

After Cameron's boyfriend discovers her and Coley (Quinn Shephard) in the backseat, Cameron's religious aunt (played by Kerry Butler) brings her legal ward (Cameron's parents died in a car accident) to a camp called God's Promise. There, Cameron meets an assortment of fellow teenagers, and she becomes close friends with Jane (Sasha Lane) and Adam (Forrest Goodluck)—two rebels who see through the camp's procedures. Most of the other attendees don't have the fortune to see through the process. Cameron's roommate Erin (Emily Skeggs) really believes she wants to change (even if she "fails" one particular night). Like the other teens here, she has a picture of an iceberg on the wall—the tip of it is her "same-sex attraction" and, beneath the surface of the water, is a list of things that have "caused" it.

The iceberg theory comes from Dr. Lydia Marsh (Jennifer Ehle), a psychologist who runs the camp with her younger brother Rick (John Gallagher Jr.), an ordained minister. Rick was Lydia's first "successful" test subject. He was gay, according to himself and his sister, but now he's "cured" and dating Bethany (Marin Ireland), who's a teacher at the camp. Of all the lonely souls in this camp, Rick might be among the loneliest of the bunch. Akhavan sees him in the same light as the camp's attendees, especially during a late scene, when Cameron presses him to provide some logical or emotional rationale to the camp's procedures.

About half of the film is dedicated to these procedures, which are more or less a form of brainwashing that uses social norms, guilt, and religious faith as cudgels against the minds of confused teenagers. Mind you, their confusion is that of any teenager, trying to find his or her own place in the world and within his or her own skin. The film finds a delicate balance in going after the specifics of this alleged therapy, not the religion beneath it. The question of faith here remains a personal one (Cameron isn't sure about her beliefs, although it has little to do with the camp's practices), and for those attendees who see themselves as adherents to Christianity, religion becomes a terrible weapon against them.

This is a specific, subversive type of cruelty, and seeing how easy it is for Lydia to convince some of these characters—including Cameron at certain points—to accept it as a form of help is disturbing. The Miseducation of Cameron Post, though, sees through both the lie and the easy path of attacking the lie. The lie is obvious. The hope beyond it is more rewarding.

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