‘BOY ERASED’ FASCINATES
“Boy Erased” deals with gay conversion therapy and also a culture and a way of life in which such a thing could make sense. It’s an immersion into a world and a mindset, both of which are foreign to many people who live in cities, but the foreignness makes it fascinating. To writer-director Joel Edgerton’s credit, “Boy Erased” is fair to people who think in this way, even as it exposes the bad things that can happen as a result.
The film is based on Garrard Conley’s memoir of growing up gay in fundamentalist Arkansas. The names are changed, and so here we follow the story of Jared (Lucas Hedges), an intelligent kid whose mother seems like a meek church lady — except that she is played by Nicole Kidman, so she can’t stay meek for long — and whose father is a Baptist preacher, played by the always formidable Russell Crowe.
On the surface, everything’s great. Jared has a girlfriend and is about to graduate from high school. But the girlfriend is unable to persuade him to have sex with her, and Jared lives with the oppressive knowledge that his thoughts, fantasies and impulses define him as something wrong and perhaps evil in the belief system of everyone he knows, including his own parents.
He might have gone on like this for a while, with his internal and external lives at cross-purposes, except that one day he is outed. The outing comes in the form of an anonymous phone call, and in the ensuing family discussion, Jared admits to having gay proclivities. So Dad gives him a choice, either be cast out of the house as a deviant or agree to counseling in the form of conversion therapy. Understandably, Jared chooses to get conversion therapy.
As Jared, Hedges gives a measured, carefully scored performance, in that we can read the progress of his thinking just by watching his face over the course of the film. He starts off guilty and hopeful. Being gay has been nothing but a horrible strain and inconvenience, so if he can be transformed and jump back into the car with his girlfriend and a brand-new attitude, that’s fine with him. But he’s too smart not to see what’s in front of him and admit what’s going on.
Edgerton, who wrote and directed, casts himself as Sykes, who runs the conversion program, and he couldn’t have found a better actor for the role.
“Boy Erased” is something more and something less than an expose of conversion therapy practices. The larger picture is the social context, which encompasses the church, community and family. Jared’s parents find know everything they’ve been told, and they know how they feel about their son, and they have to decide what to trust, their beliefs or their perceptions.
As such, “Boy Erased” is a lowkey film, not especially dramatic or ambitious, but dedicated to showing how people think and can sometimes change.