Boy Erased (2018)

[Thomas T]

Title: Boy Erased (2018)

Tagline: The truth cannot be converted.

Genre: Drama

Director: Joel Edgerton

Cast: Lucas Hedges, Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, Joel Edgerton, Xavier Dolan, Troye Sivan, Jesse LaTourette, Britton Sear, Cherry Jones, Joe Alwyn, Théodore Pellerin, Flea, Emily Hinkler, David Ditmore, Matt Burke, William Ngo, Lindsey Moser, David Joseph Craig, Victor McCay, Tim Ware, Madelyn Cline, Josh Scherer, Frank Hoyt Taylor, Jason Davis, Kevin Linehan, Paige Henry, Malerie Grady, Will Kindrachuk, Drew Scheid, Jesse Malinowski, Joy Jacobson, Randy Havens

Release: 2018-11-02

Runtime: 114

Plot: Jared, the son of a Baptist pastor in a small American town, is outed to his parents at age 19. Jared is faced with an ultimatum: attend a gay conversion therapy program – or be permanently exiled and shunned by his family, friends, and faith.

https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/472451-boy-erased

 

[Colin Jacobson]

I guess no one else saw this.

I took in an after-work screening and thought the film seemed oddly detached and dull. The synopsis makes it sound a lot more dramatic and involving than it actually is.

Oh,the film musters the occasional scene of actual drama, but most of it plods along in a slow, bland manner that never really seems to invest in the subject matter. We get a vague sense of the characters and what they go through but we don't feel connected or all that concerned.

Some of the issue stems from Hedges' strangely flat lead performance. So good in "Manchester By the Sea", Hedges comes across as vaguely earnest here but he never manages to bring out internal life in his character, so we find ourselves left at arm's length from him.

Perhaps the problem doesn't stem from Hedges' work as much as the script. "Erased" often feels more like a public service announcement than a narrative movie, as writer/director Joel Edgerton focuses more on the folly of "conversion therapy" than attempts to bring us an involving tale.

Normally I'd appreciate a movie without excessive sentiment and melodrama, so it feels weird to wish a film came with more scenes of that sort. I just think "Erased" lacks the passion it needs to become more engrossing.

I do like the movie's refusal to paint the heavily religious characters as cartoon Bible-thumpers - well, most of the time - and it allows us to see them as well-meaning but misguided. None of this makes me invested in the story or characters, as "Erased" comes across like a bloodless "coming of age" story...

 

[Jake Lipson]

I guess no one else saw this.

It's here, and I've been meaning to get to it, but there have been so many films out lately that I haven't gotten to it yet. Thanks for your comments, which certainly don't make me feel like I need to rush out.

Additionally, The Miseducation of Cameron Post did a gay conversion therapy story earlier this year extremely successfully; although admittedly it was not hugely seen, whether we need another film in that space so soon afterwards is an open question. This one feels a lot more like it was designed to be an awards contender with the big-name cast than that one did.

 

[benbess]

I guess no one else saw this.

I took in an after-work screening and thought the film seemed oddly detached and dull. The synopsis makes it sound a lot more dramatic and involving than it actually is.

Oh,the film musters the occasional scene of actual drama, but most of it plods along in a slow, bland manner that never really seems to invest in the subject matter. We get a vague sense of the characters and what they go through but we don't feel connected or all that concerned.

Some of the issue stems from Hedges' strangely flat lead performance. So good in "Manchester By the Sea", Hedges comes across as vaguely earnest here but he never manages to bring out internal life in his character, so we find ourselves left at arm's length from him.

Perhaps the problem doesn't stem from Hedges' work as much as the script. "Erased" often feels more like a public service announcement than a narrative movie, as writer/director Joel Edgerton focuses more on the folly of "conversion therapy" than attempts to bring us an involving tale.

Normally I'd appreciate a movie without excessive sentiment and melodrama, so it feels weird to wish a film came with more scenes of that sort. I just think "Erased" lacks the passion it needs to become more engrossing.

I do like the movie's refusal to paint the heavily religious characters as cartoon Bible-thumpers - well, most of the time - and it allows us to see them as well-meaning but misguided. None of this makes me invested in the story or characters, as "Erased" comes across like a bloodless "coming of age" story...

Thanks for your honest review. Based on this I'm going to skip it.

 

[Thomas T]

I guess no one else saw this.

I took in an after-work screening and thought the film seemed oddly detached and dull. The synopsis makes it sound a lot more dramatic and involving than it actually is.

Oh,the film musters the occasional scene of actual drama, but most of it plods along in a slow, bland manner that never really seems to invest in the subject matter. We get a vague sense of the characters and what they go through but we don't feel connected or all that concerned.

Some of the issue stems from Hedges' strangely flat lead performance. So good in "Manchester By the Sea", Hedges comes across as vaguely earnest here but he never manages to bring out internal life in his character, so we find ourselves left at arm's length from him.

Perhaps the problem doesn't stem from Hedges' work as much as the script. "Erased" often feels more like a public service announcement than a narrative movie, as writer/director Joel Edgerton focuses more on the folly of "conversion therapy" than attempts to bring us an involving tale.

Normally I'd appreciate a movie without excessive sentiment and melodrama, so it feels weird to wish a film came with more scenes of that sort. I just think "Erased" lacks the passion it needs to become more engrossing.

I do like the movie's refusal to paint the heavily religious characters as cartoon Bible-thumpers - well, most of the time - and it allows us to see them as well-meaning but misguided. None of this makes me invested in the story or characters, as "Erased" comes across like a bloodless "coming of age" story...

I disagree. I found it very powerful. You neglect to mention that Edgerton was filming an autobiography by Garrard Conley (called Jared Eamons in the film) so he was hampered by sticking to certain facts. I suppose he could have taken more "artistic license" to juice it up but I liked that he took the film in a straight forward manner rather than pandering to the audience. The Miseducation Of Cameron Post had the fortune to be fiction so its film makers could do whatever they want to make their point. Boy Erased is just one man's story. His story didn't work for you but there are many others to tell so perhaps another person's narrative will. As for Hedges' performance, I thought he was excellent (as he is in the upcoming Ben Is Back in a very different role). His character is confused and going through emotions he's still not sure of so his reticence is understandable. His conservative upbringing and background certainly suggests that men don't show their emotions and we can certainly see Jared trying to keep his reined in.

 

[Jake Lipson]

I finally got around to seeing this today and I agree with Colin about most of the movie's deficiencies. However, I don't think Hedges can be blamed for it. I think he was as good as the flat writing allowed him to be.

I also saw The Miseducation of Cameron Post back in August and loved that. It is another movie about gay conversion therapy, and they didn't ask to exist in comparison with each other, but it's inevitable to do that because they are so similar and were released in such a compressed timeframe. Like Armageddon and Deep Impact and A Bug's Life and Antz.

Unfortunately, that is to this movie's detriment. Boy Erased is perfectly fine, but pretty much every scene of it (with the exception of the ending which is quite different) has a corresponding scene in Cameron Post that covers the same narrative beat. They're not always in the same order or executed in the same manner, but they're all there. And Cameron Post, which I loved, just does all of them significantly better than Boy Erased does.

It's not that there's really much wrong with Boy Erased, but it simply lacks the emotional center of Cameron Post. In Boy Erased, I got mad at what was happening to Jared, because it's designed to make you mad, but I didn't really feel like I knew him on a personal level or empathized with him as a character, above and beyond being irritated by his circumstances. Jared was in many cases a blank slate protagonist for whom we could project people we know onto the story, whereas Cameron's personality and story was more specific, which made it more relatable and palpable because we were given more to care about in watching her individual journey.

Spoiler

Boy Erased is also missing a critical moment for Jared. He comes into the facility wanting to change, and we see him become disillusioned with the conversion therapy, but we don't see a moment where he realizes that it's okay for him to be gay. He has that moment somewhere in between leaving the facility and when we catch up with him after the four-year time jump when he's confronting Russell Crowe, because when he stands up to Crowe, he is absolutely resolute and proud in his acceptance of who he is. But the movie didn't show us how he went from "Yes, I want to change" to "I'm gay and I'm your son and neither of those things are going to change." The fact that he doesn't like the conversion therapy and loses confidence in its ability to change him is one thing, and his accepting that change should not happen is another thing, and I don't think he had that moment in front of the audience. So, the arc feels incomplete because there's a significant piece of storytelling missing there.

The problem is that we needed to see the character development with Jared in order to more fully relate to him, and the movie as a whole is lesser than it should be because we don't get those moments. Not only the omission of the moment where he learns to accept being gay, but that is the biggest one. It's not enough for us to assume it happened over the course of the time jump; it's something extremely major that we need to actually watch happen for the story to feel all there.

The ironic thing here is that Jared is a real person, and he actually wrote the memoir on which the movie is based, whereas Cameron Post is based on a novel which is entirely fictional and from the author's mind. So, it should be easier for the filmmakers behind Boy Erased to put in personal details because their protagonist is an actual person who lived this experience, whereas there's no direct source person for Cameron Post. But actually, it's the other way around, in that Cameron Post is the movie with fuller coloring for its characters and a much fuller arc for the protagonist, when it's the one that is from fiction. Clohe Grace Moretz does extraordinary work in that film and deserves to be getting the Oscar talk that Hedges is getting, but her film is the lower-profile one, so she isn't.

Also:

Spoiler

Did Joel Edgerton write Nicole Kidman's "I knew in my bones it wasn't right" scene with the intention of getting her an Oscar? It sure feels like it was designed to be her "big Oscar moment" for the clip airing on the telecast in the event of her nomination. With respect to those who made it, this feels like the kind of film which is designed to win Oscars, and it has an air of self-importance about it that it never quite actually reaches because it's not well-developed enough.

Oh, and the reveal that "The real Sykes now lives with his husband" was a huge thing to just drop in the credit. I would love to see the movie where he transitions from being an instructor of conversion therapy to an out and presumably happy gay man more than this film, but that's not what this movie wanted to do.

On another note, I had a funny experience at the box office today. I had a Movie Cash coupon from the studio for $5 off admission to Boy Erased, which came to me a few weeks back because I am on their mailing list. The theater was to process this as they would a credit card (numbers to do so were on the certificate) and collect remaining balance from me in cash. This seems fairly simple to me; I read the rules when I got the certificate and it made sense how to use it.

I doubt Movie Cash is something box offices see every day, but I genuinely don't think anybody working at this theater had ever seen one before, which surprised me because I know what they are and have had them from time to time before. Instead of taking care of it at the outside box office, they asked me to come inside and go to the customer service desk, where the woman at the box office had to get her manager to figure out how to process the thing, which took five minutes, while the woman at the box office waited on other customers at a different window. This is not a complaint, since it did work and they took it without complaint or issue and were nice about it. But it's just a funny observation that you'd think they would have seen one before at some point for some movie. Cinemark is a major exhibitor and they are on the list of theaters that accept Movie Cash certificates, so it was just funny to me that it seemed to be a totally foreign concept for them. But it worked out, so that's fine.

Using that, I got in for a balance of $2.88, and it was certainly worth that. However, I don't think it's anywhere near one of the best films of the year, and I doubt it will get much awards love. While I would not discourage anybody who is interested in seeing it from doing so, I'm not going to go out of my way to recommend it to people either. I would encourage anybody who thinks this sounds interesting to also see The Miseducation of Cameron Post as well, since a much better similar film. Cameron Post I would give an A+, and Boy Erased is a C, mostly for the performances.

The cast is good in it, but Kidman and Crowe aren't any better than they usually are, and the writing and directing just doesn't serve the actors as well as it should. It felt like this could easily have been an admittedly high-class television film rather than a theatrical release and its impact wouldn't be terribly lost.

I liked it well enough and am glad that I saw it, but I don't expect to revisit it.