Boy Erased (2018)
Directed by Joel Edgerton
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.
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3 films that influenced Boy Erased
What critics say influenced Boy Erased
While competent and compelling, Boy Erased doesn't offer much that's different from The Miseducation of Cameron Post, another film on the same topic from earlier this year, although it's very different in tone from 1999's But I'm a Cheerleader, which co-starred RuPaul and gave the material a campier sheen.
Where But I’m a Cheerleader used an exaggerated representation of conversion therapy to make its point, this film uses sincerity and realism to deliver its meaning.
If you like this, try: “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” and “But I’m a Cheerleader”…
And the satirical 1999 film But I’m A Cheerleader remains the exemplar of non-documentary conversion camp dramas.
The trouble with such films — really, with any story set in a rigidly conservative institution, be it a mental hospital (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”), boarding school (“Dead Poets Society”), boot camp (the first half of “Full Metal Jacket”), or conversion program (“The Miseducation of Cameron Post”) — is that they inevitably feel like prison movies, falling back on reductive tropes (like the idea that the authority figures are hypocrites) to make the case that the only solution is to break out.
“Fake it till you make it,” says an authoritarian ex-inmate figure (Flea, in the prototypical R. Lee Ermey role from Full Metal Jacket ) as he instructs the teens to take a combative stance, then has them ranked according to “manliness.”
The scenes set at Love in Action are so by the book that you just assume one of the kids will be abused by a sadistic counselor and another will be so Full Metal Jacketed by the dehumanizing doctrine that he'll off himself by Act 3.
Lucas Hedges is a very talented young actor whose first significant role was in 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom.