Film review

Joel Edgerton (2018)

It was difficult to watch at the most basic level – one of the murkiest viewing experiences I’ve had in a long time.  I thought at first there was something wrong with the print at Wandsworth Cineworld but it wasn’t as if this was the first screening of Boy Erased there.  Then I wondered if Joel Edgerton meant somehow to express the film’s name in his visual scheme.  That couldn’t be right, though:  the title character wasn’t the only one affected.  The action takes place in half-light, regardless of location or the hour of the day.  I spent much of the picture’s nearly two hours peering to try and see more – especially of the actors’ faces.  The cinematography is by Eduard Grau, whose name, on this occasion, is all too apt.

Boy Erased is an adaptation (Edgerton, directing his second feature, also wrote the screenplay) of Garrard Conley’s memoir of the same name, published in 2016.  Conley, an only child raised in Arkansas by fundamentalist Christian parents, recalls his teenage years and increasing struggles with his sexual orientation.  Outed to his mother and father as gay by another student at the liberal arts college where both were studying, he was enrolled on an intensive two-week course of conversion therapy at a ‘Love in Action’ unit in 2004.  He was a ‘day boy’ on the course, being driven to and from by it by his mother and spending the intervening evenings with her at the motel where they booked in for the fortnight.  Conley literally broke out of the course during the second week but that isn’t the end of his story.  He goes on to describe his difficult relationships in the years that followed, especially with his father, a successful car dealer and Southern Baptist preacher.  The book is well written and generous.  Its subtitle is ‘A memoir of identity, faith, and family’ – and Conley’s evident love for both his parents renders his memoir more complex and affecting.  When I read it earlier this year, in preparation for watching the film, I wondered if this complexity might prove a mixed blessing to Joel Edgerton.  Another of the book’s striking features – and another challenge for an adapter of it – is that, while Conley certainly succeeds in dramatising his experiences, much of the drama goes on inside his head.

It’s not unusual to watch a screen biography and ask why, since so many facts have been changed, the film-makers haven’t also renamed the characters – in effect giving themselves fictional free rein.  The answer is often that doing so could harm the movie’s commercial prospects.  That obviously depends on the magnitude of the biographee’s celebrity, however; since Garrard Conley isn’t, say, Freddie Mercury, Edgerton’s decision to turn the protagonist and his parents into the Eamons family – Jared (Lucas Hedges), Nancy (Nicole Kidman) and Marshall (Russell Crowe) – seems, in theory, sensible.  Perhaps respectful too:  not only are Martha and Hershel Conley still around but the events of Boy Erased, as their son’s book makes clear, are recent enough for the Conleys’ feelings about them still to be raw.  In the event, though, Edgerton’s fictionalising doesn’t add value.  He doesn’t exploit it to imaginative effect.  His film ends with photographs of and text about Garrard Conley and his parents.

For much of the time, Edgerton is largely faithful to events in Conley’s account, and to its spirit.  He doesn’t exactly probe the parents’ struggle to reconcile the imperatives of doing right by both their son and their religious beliefs but neither Marshall nor Nancy is portrayed as a hellfire-threatening monster.  The tone is very different from that of the (fiction-based) The Miseducation of Cameron Post, a gay conversion therapy story told from the point of view of an American teenage girl, in which Cameron Post’s family, as well as her ‘therapists’, are adversaries.  Edgerton retains a crucial element of the book in one of Boy Erased’s few overtly dramatic moments.  During a group therapy session, Victor Sykes (played by Edgerton), the head man at the Love in Action unit, aggressively demands that Jared acknowledge that he’s angry with his father, who referred him for treatment.  Sykes’s onslaught causes the usually mild-mannered Jared to lose his temper:  he insists, though, that he’s mad not with his father but with Sykes, for trying to pressure him into falsehood.

Jared’s resistance in this scene is a highlight, as well as a twofold relief.  Not only is someone standing up to Sykes but it’s the undemonstrative hero who’s impelled to do so.  Edgerton doesn’t use voiceover to indicate Jared’s thoughts – perhaps to avoid the obvious, easy option, or perhaps to reinforce our sense of him as a helpless victim.  In his first lead role in a feature film, Lucas Hedges is expressive, even in the semi-darkness.  He’s emotionally fine-tuned and suggests a particular intelligence (his acting is streets ahead of Chloë Grace Moretz’s in Cameron Post).  But the set-up of Boy Erased means that Jared is inevitably an often passive figure, and the visuals have the effect of accentuating his muted presence.  In spite of some good passages of dialogue, it’s frustrating that all three of Hedges, Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe are denied the opportunity to take their characters further – although, with Destroyer still fresh (or putrid) in the memory, it’s good to see Kidman resuming normal nuanced service here.  She and Hedges convey well the subtly persistent implication of the source material that Garrard and his mother are something of a couple.  The film also has a marvellous brief prologue, purporting to show Jared as a little boy:  the extraordinarily vivid child we see is actually home-movie footage of the young Lucas Hedges.  Edgerton himself gives a well-judged performance as Sykes, resisting the temptation to play him as crudely malign, thereby making him more malignant.

Conley’s title echoes Girl, Interrupted, which made the same journey from autobiographical memoir to the cinema screen and told the story of a teenager sent to a mental institution.  Its curriculum seems to qualify Love in Action as a quasi-madhouse too but it doesn’t come across that way in Edgerton’s version of Boy Erased.  The therapy sessions are, for the most part, somewhat drably aberrant and punitive; the other young people treated alongside Jared barely register.  The film’s music (by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans) is, unsurprisingly, sensitive, sparse and mournful:  it doesn’t so much play in the background as knell.  The prevailing glum atmosphere does ensure that a couple of atypical sequences make their mark.  Jared, out jogging, is confronted by an advertising hoarding that displays the large image of a shirtless male model.  He stops and touches the image twice, then moves out of shot.  The camera stays on the shirtless man; we hear an anguished cry from Jared and a rock breaks the glass covering the hoarding.  It’s not a subtle moment but its directness is close to refreshing.  That’s hardly the word for the distressing scene in which Jared is raped by fellow student Henry (Joe Alwyn) – who subsequently phones Nancy, pretending to be a college official, to report her son’s sexual misbehaviour – but again the impact is strong.  What’s more, the near-invisibility of what’s happening pays dividends in the rape sequence:  it makes all the starker the sounds of Jared’s cries of pain and terror.  Overall, the narrative is thinly textured:  we don’t get a sense, as we do in Conley’s original, of how inescapable evangelical Christianity is in the life he’s led.  In the book, prayerfulness is pervasive – not just in church services and at family mealtimes but among the other employees at the father’s car dealership, where his son regularly helps out.

Even while he remains true to Garrard Conley’s open-heartedness, you suspect that Joel Edgerton is bound to have to resolve matters more conventionally, and so he does.  He changes tack abruptly – in the latter stages of the showdown between Jared and Sykes.  Edgerton has Nancy turn up and yell at Sykes that her son isn’t staying in the unit a moment longer.  An earlier scene in which Sykes presides at a gruesome mock funeral for Cameron (Britton Sear), one of the other boys undergoing conversion therapy and not progressing as Sykes thinks he should, is powerful; the news that Jared receives, after he’s quit Love in Action, that Cameron has actually committed suicide less so.  Their son’s ordeal in the unit brings about a seismic shift in his parents’ marriage – to the extent that Nancy even stops attending church regularly.  These inventions are perfectly permissible, of course:  the Eamons don’t have to be the Conleys.  They’re nevertheless disappointing – predictable underlinings of the film-maker’s moral point of view.

Boy Erased pays relatively little attention to the fact that John Smid, the real-life ‘inspiration’ for Sykes, and others in the Love in Action set-up presented themselves as living proof of the efficacy of gay conversion therapy.   Perhaps Edgerton wanted to keep his powder dry for the closing legends.  These inform the audience first that Garrard Conley is now in a same-sex marriage, then that Smid is too.  The latter information seems designed to illustrate, as a kind of religious irony, that Smid has seen the light.  Its effect is, rather, to enrage.  Three years after leaving Love in Action, Smid announced that he had ‘never met a man who experienced a change from homosexual to heterosexual’.  On his Twitter feed, he now introduces himself as ‘Author … speaker, reconciler and I affirm one’s freedom to choose … Partner to a beloved man [sic]’.  Given the damage he must have caused to many of those he treated for their ‘gay sin’, it’s not so much Smid’s conversion as his seeming impenitence that’s breathtaking.  He spent years trying to shame people into changing their sexual orientation.  His public statements since then suggest that he himself is shameless.

11 February 2019