Boy Erased

Boy Erased

Starring Lucas Hedges, Nicole Kidman, Joel Edgerton, Russell Crowe

Directed by Joel Edgerton

The Story:
Jared Eamons (Lucas Hedges) is a well-adjusted, happy young man who's the son of Baptist preacher Marshall (Russell Crowe) and Nancy (Nicole Kidman), and seems to be having a good life.  Yet on the inside he's harbored feelings toward men that he feels is wrong because of his strict Christian upbringing, and after a traumatizing encounter in college, he comes out to his family.

They send him to a gay conversion agency called Love in Action run by Victor Sykes (Joel Edgerton), and Jared is repeatedly told that his feelings aren't natural and are sinful, and the only way to return to his family and be normal again is to get rid of those unholy urges.  The struggle grows within Jared as he wrestles inwardly with who he really is, and who other people want him to be.

The Synopsis:
The making of a great film is its ability to elicit a response in the viewer - a film that resonates with your very soul, one that refuses to be forgotten, one that is almost utterly unbelievable.  With "Boy Erased," director Joel Edgerton manages to produce such a film, but in doing so elicits some of the most negative responses you could get - anger, sadness, outrage.  Yet, this is what the film was trying to get across, so in that respect it did its job perfectly: it shed light on an event so outlandish and outrageous, it couldn't possibly be true - yet it was.

The issue of gay conversion therapy is definitely a hot-button issue, and fourteen states have outright banned it on the basis of it being a cruel, demoralizing, abusive program that tries to figuratively (and sometimes literally) beat the gay out of you.  By convincing those who have same sex attraction that what they feel is a mortal sin, it creates issues that were never there to begin with, leading to a majority of those in the program to feel depression and self-anger.  It's no wonder that the suicide rates among gay teens are so astronomical - they feel they have no hope in changing, and think that God will not love them, and neither will their family.

Back to the film itself, this is one of the few films I've ever seen where I was literally weeping while watching it.  I went in expecting it to be rough, but I wasn't thinking it was going to be THAT rough.  Seeing how kids are treated in this film - taken from the real-life memoirs of a man who went through it - was downright horrifying, scarier than any horror film I've seen, and more disturbing than I could've imagined.

Lucas Hedges plays Jared Eamons, who tells his very devout Christian family that he's attracted to men, and is sent to a gay conversion therapy group led by the dubious Victor Sykes.  The program is shrouded in mystery (the participants are told to not talk to anyone outside the facility about what happens), the credentials are highly suspect, and the actual manual used is filled with spelling errors ("God" is actually typed as "Dog").  The practices that take place are beyond horrifying, and makes you wonder how such an institution can even legally exist anywhere in America.

Lucas Hedges is one of cinema's most talented up-and-coming actors, earning a name for himself solidly in the independent film market, and already earning an Academy Award nomination for his stellar work in "Manchester by the Sea," and here he truly gives a powerhouse performance, one that needs to be seen to believed, and one that needs major award recognition.  The struggle he faces - when he shouldn't really have struggled at all - is palpable, and you can sense a powder-keg waiting to erupt inside of him.  When the denouement happens, it's spellbinding, and breathtaking.

Equally, Nicole Kidman shines as Jared's mother Nancy, who at first goes along with the therapy because it's what her Baptist husband thinks is best, but as any good mother knows, she senses something isn't right, which leads to a revelation that's as powerful as anything set to screen, going father than you'd think it'd go, providing a truly realistic and powerful experience.

Likewise, Russell Crowe and Joel Edgerton give cringe-worthy performances (not in the sense that they're bad, but the characters they're playing are that vile).  As Jared's Baptist preaching father, Russell Crowe plays Marshall as a no-nonsense, by-the-good-book, unemotional man who doesn't seemingly love his son at all, and who literally pushes him away.  As the leader of the conversion therapy group, Edgerton is utterly villainous, along the likes of Hannibal Lecter himself, in how he treats the teens under his care.

The film focuses on the major, insurmountable, unbelievable flaws in the gay conversion therapy group Love in Action, whose literature was preserved in the Smithsonian Institution to show how radical and dangerous it really is.  The film did its job incredibly well, as it left me feeling anger toward the program, and sadness that there are millions of teenagers out there who feel shamed for being who they are, and feel like they have nowhere to turn to.  Hopefully the times will change, and they'll find love and acceptance before it's too late for them.

The Summary:
Eliciting important responses from the audience, "Boy Erased" is a  harrowing, moving tale of the dangers of gay conversion therapy, performed by polished actors at the top of their games, a film that needs to be seen, even though it's incredibly rough to sit through.

The Score: A+