Boy Erased Is a Grim Portrait of Repression and Abuse

Australian actor-turned-director Joel Edgerton’s second feature, Boy Erased, ditches his debut film The Gift’s subversive twist on stalker narratives in favor of broadcasting what A Serious Social Statement it is. It’s an ABC Afterschool Special with aspirations of winning a Best Picture Oscar. The dim cinematography and lighting, reminiscent of many of Clint Eastwood’s directorial efforts, make it look like the bulbs in every interior setting need replacing. The film’s tone takes a grim, real-life situation and makes sure its hero, Jared Eamons (Lucas Hedges), isn’t allowed any pleasure.

Adapting Garrard Conley’s memoir of his experiences with conversion therapy, Boy Erased changes his name and casts no less than four Aussies as Americans in small-town Georgia. The film begins with Jared’s entry to Love in Action, which promises to turn gays into heterosexuals via time spent at the equivalent of a drug- or alcohol-rehabilitation center. Victor (Edgerton) offers lectures denying the reality of sexual orientation, telling everyone that homosexuality is merely an unhealthy behavior caused by seeing relatives watch porn or belonging to a gang. In flashbacks, we see Jared’s life with his father, a conservative Baptist minister (Russell Crowe), and slightly more understanding mother (Nicole Kidman).

Boy Erased packs a wallop, but it’s not interested in anything but evoking despair. This becomes an issue when it uses the freedom granted by an R rating to depict Jared being raped by a man but never shows the character expressing his desires in anything close to an equally explicit manner. The rape scene seems like an attempt to show how homophobes’ idea of proper Christian heterosexuality actually leads to men abusing their power rather than being able to love each other, but the latter is almost entirely missing from the film. The film’s extremely dark tone makes a point about how vicious and misguided “gay conversion” is, but let’s face this fact: We live in a society in which it’s easier for a film like this to get a relatively wide release and reach heterosexual audiences if it contains a lengthy male-on-male rape scene than if it showed 30 seconds of consensual gay sex.

It’s a convincing portrait of the conversion therapy center as a hellish scam that leads to self-hatred, even suicide. The scene in which a lecturer, played by Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, watches Jared as he urinates to make sure he doesn’t masturbate, commenting on the “Morse code” pattern of drips and calling him a “faggot,” is among the film’s most disturbing moments. However, Jared’s eventual rebellion gets much less screen time than his emotional degradation. How did he grow up to become the healthy, happy gay man who wrote a memoir about these experiences? The growth of Crowe’s character is also key to its narrative arc, but we don’t see much of him before the ending, beyond his sermonizing in church. This film seems aimed more at conservative parents than teens like Jared, and it might be able to speak to them. But are those conservative parents inclined to see such a film?

It occurred to me that openly gay rapper Kevin Abstract’s music video “Miserable America” (which the MC also directed) plays on a similar theme. In the video, a lesbian teen shoots the manager of a conversion therapy center after one of her friends commits suicide there. The video expresses the kinds of emotions a boy like Jared would go through — not to mention an anger about homophobia in a way this film wouldn’t dare — far more successfully than Boy Erased does, and it does so in less than three minutes.