Boy Erased

BOY ERASED   ***

Joel Edgerton

2018

IDEA:  A young man in conservative Christian Arkansas is sent to a conversion therapy camp when he is outed to his parents.

BLURB:  Boy Erased is a social advocacy film that appeals unabashedly to the emotions, not from a place of calculated tear-wringing but from an instinctual alliance with its LGBT subjects. There is nothing new about a film highlighting injustice by stoking the audience’s anger and empathy, but Boy Erased subtly diverges from many in how non-didactically it does this, assuming already the spectator’s knowledge of LGBT persecution so that it can train its attention on a wider fabric of oppressive social and religious conditioning. Indeed, Edgerton is interested in more than simply exposing the inhumane, pernicious nature of conversion therapy programs. Though the scenes inside the institution are appropriately grueling and maddening, what stand out just as much are the conversations and gestures of the ostensibly virtuous Christian parents played by Kidman and Crowe, which reveal the ingrained beliefs that invariably and often unconsciously dictate harmful actions. Edgerton, whose own performance deftly avoids the cartoonish villainy that might have predictably attended his noxious character in another director/actor’s hands, does not demonize these parents, or Christianity. He understands a milieu and a mindset that extend far beyond them, and recognizes with sensitivity the strides that must be taken in order to ameliorate their entrenched ideologies. And in the powerful performances of Kidman and Crowe, and certainly of Lucas Hedges, he locates the personal pain, longing, and strife that so much dogma has engendered. Boy Erased is fully, cathartically on Jared’s side, but it is so poignant because it maintains hope that those who demanded he change might realize it is themselves who must do so instead.