Desiree Akhavan (2018)
This is the first of two high-profile 2018 films about a young American forced into gay conversion therapy. The other film, Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased, which is due for release in the US in November, is based on Gareth Conley’s memoir of his own experiences. The Miseducation of Cameron Post is adapted from a 2012 novel by Emily M Danforth, whose book was inspired by a real-life case from a few years previously. Chloë Grace Moretz, who plays the title character, has talked in interview of how two of her elder brothers underwent gay conversion therapy, which still goes on – in a less explicitly aggressive form, Moretz says, than in 1993, when the movie is set. These ‘try to pray the gay away’ films are nothing if not relevant. It’s a pity that Cameron Post is nothing but relevant.
Montana teenager Cameron is an orphan, whose parents died in a car crash. Although she doesn’t share the strong Christian beliefs of her aunt and guardian Ruth (Kerry Butler), Cameron dutifully attends Bible study classes with her school friend Coley (Quinn Shephard). The two girls have also developed a physical relationship; on high-school prom night they’re discovered making love in a car. Ruth dispatches Cameron to ‘God’s Promise’, a singular form of summer camp, run by Reverend Rick (John Gallagher Jr) and his therapist sister Lydia (Jennifer Ehle), where young gay people are ‘educated’ to overcome same-sex attraction – ‘SSA’. As Rick tells new arrivals, he is himself a successful graduate of the God’s Promise training programme: he now has a girlfriend (Marin Ireland) to prove it. The rest of the film illustrates life at the camp and Cameron’s defiance of its regime – a defiance that increases in tandem with the friendships she forms with two other prisoners, Jane Fonda [sic] (Sasha Lane, from American Honey) and Adam Red Eagle (Forrest Goodluck).
Desiree Akhavan, who wrote the screenplay with Cecilia Frugiuele, loses no time in making Cameron’s sexuality clear, even before she’s outed. She and Coley hurry home from Bible group, shut the bedroom door behind them and get to it. When the girls are posing for photographs with the two boys partnering them to the prom, Chloë Grace Moretz’s face expresses nothing more complex than Cameron’s discomfort at the falsity of what she’s doing. These early sequences are only anticipatory, though. Both director and lead actress are marking time before Cameron goes to the camp and the film’s real action can get underway.
Akhavan’s descriptions of the God’s Promise curriculum – and though there’s leisure time, nothing is extra-curricular – have a grim fascination. Entrants to the camp, known as ‘disciples’, are issued on arrival with a drawing of an iceberg, representing their sexuality, and told to write on the submerged part what they see as the factors causing their SSA. (It’s considered an important sign of growing trust when two disciples are ready to share with each other their iceberg details.) Confident, chilling Dr Lydia interprets the feelings Cameron had (still has) for Coley: Cameron didn’t really desire Coley; rather, she desired to be Coley. The doctor invokes a charming analogy. It’s been said, she explains, that human cannibals always like to eat the choicest specimens available. At ‘social’ events, a band combines evangelical words and dreary rock music to soul-destroying effect; one of the disciples, Helen (Melanie Ehrlich), performs a kind of pious karaoke. Attempts to modernise hymns by turning them into pop ballads are always worrying, with their simple substitution of Christ for a human lover in otherwise clichéd lyrics. The preoccupation at God’s Promise with getting disciples’ sexuality straight gives Helen’s number an extra creepiness.
There’s a grotesque comedy about the number too and the film is at its best showing the absurd consequences of the God’s Promise set-up. When Cameron has an erotic dream about Dr Lydia, her moans excite her room-mate Erin (Emily Skeggs), an especially conscientious disciple, enough for her to climb into bed and have sex with Cameron. But episodes like this are few and far between, and the small cast of significant characters is too schematic. To underline the breadth of its commitment to diversity, The Miseducation of Cameron Post gives Jane Fonda an artificial leg (in which she stashes pot) and Adam, as his full name suggests, Native American lineage. (Jane, raised in a commune, has a new, zealously Christian stepfather to thank for her exile to God’s Promise. Adam’s politically ambitious father fears a gay son may prove to be an electoral liability. Their monstrous parents make the right-on youngsters all the more admirable.) Reverend Rick and Dr Lydia operate as a good cop/bad cop combo – perhaps that should be pathetic cop in Rick’s case, though John Gallagher Jr plays him sensitively.
Just as I was thinking Jennifer Ehle’s interpretation of Lydia was indebted to Louise Fletcher’s portrait of Nurse Ratched, the plot of Cameron Post suddenly turned for a while into that of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Disciple Mark (Owen Campbell), upset by the news that his father considers him still too ‘feminine’ to return home, goes berserk in a group therapy session. His increasing distress ruffles Lydia’s sinister, condescending calm; unable to reason with him as he lies on the ground, she forcibly restrains him. That night, Mark goes to the bathroom and tries to castrate himself: there are unmistakable echoes of the fate of Billy Bibbit and Nurse Ratched’s hand in it. Appalled but even more united as a result of what happens to Mark, Cameron, Jane and Adam plan to escape – to Canada, as McMurphy and the Chief (also a Native American) planned to do.
At this point, a big difference from Cuckoo’s Nest kicks in: there’s no need in Cameron Post to break out using a hydrotherapy cart. Disciples are encouraged, as part of a mens-sana-in-corpore-sano policy, to take physical exercise. When Cameron, Jane and Adam tell Rick they’re going on a hike, he’s pleased to hear it and unsuspecting. The three walk out of the camp’s grounds onto the adjoining highway. They hitch a lift and the film ends with a shot of them smiling hopefully together in the back of a trailer. If it’s this easy to leave God’s Promise, why didn’t they do it sooner? Perhaps Desiree Akhavan means the viewer to see them as scared, vulnerable kids who’ve never fended for themselves but they’re at least close to being legally adult (the actors playing them are all at least twenty). The real explanation for the delayed escape is that an appalling crisis had to take place first, to confirm the malignancy of God’s Promise – even though the audience sees and deplores this from the outset.
This hints at another difference from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Cameron Post is short on humour. The conversion therapees lack the confounding, often funny individuality of the inmates in Miloš Forman’s fine drama (nor is there much sense of tensions created by the internal hierarchy or rivalry of disciples). It may well be that, as Adam Mars-Jones suggests in his (positive) TLS review of the film, Emily Danforth took her title from an album by the American singer-rapper, Lauryn Hill (The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill). As a movie title, however, it comes over as another recent example of a director’s announcing in advance a moral judgment on their subject – in the manner of, for example, A Fantastic Woman.
In the interview in which she described her brothers’ ordeal, Chloë Grace Moretz also talked about ‘what I want to do with my platform [so that] the content I’m putting out isn’t just entertainment but is also some form of activism and social justice’. It’s one thing for an actor to engage strongly with a project as a result of personal experience; another for her or him to adopt the determinedly political approach that Moretz describes. It may be a different matter when a director and/or screenwriter does this but the actor’s essential job in naturalistic drama is to build a credible character. Moretz’s attitude comes through clearly in her performance in The Miseducation of Cameron Post and is what makes it inadequate. It’s true her role is underwritten. We have no clue, for example, as to what further education or paid employment Cameron may be missing out on as a result of being sent to the camp. To confirm the information that Cameron was a star athlete in school, Desiree Akhavan shows her doing a bit of running. But Chloë Grace Moretz makes matters worse. She presents an image of victimhood at the expense of creating a person.
11 September 2018
