Parents Marshall and Nancy Eamons (Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman) commit teenage Jared (Lucas Hedges) to residential treatment to remove his homosexuality. They're well-intentioned, albeit misguided and ignorant, but ultimately caring.
The film opens with touching home movies of Jared as a small boy — happy, inquisitive and articulate; next we see the older teenager Jared as sullen, distant and mute.
But the parents are not the bad guys. Both Kidman and Crowe touchingly convey a mother and father who are flawed but human, struggling to parent as best they can when confronted with their son’s sexual reality outside their capacity to comprehend. Thus they turn to their Bible, then to their Baptist church and its elders, then to LIA—Love in Action, the gay conversion camp set up in the hills of Arkansas, and its director, Victor Sykes.
I said there are no villains, only victims. I take that back.
Film director himself, Joel Edgerton, takes on the role of villain as Mr. Sykes, the head of the conversion camp. Insecure, self-hating and abusive, he leads a staff of other self-hating, homophobic minions, and together they wreak havoc in the lives of teens struggling with sexual identity and familial and social ostracism. It’s not surprising that Sykes and others all identify as ex-gay themselves, so they perpetuate the cycle of abuse, walking the thin line between men who do heinous acts to others because they are themselves victims.
The film is based on Garrard Conley’s 2016 memoir titled Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family, and all three get seamlessly woven into this sensitive, brutal and ultimately hopeful — at least for Jared — film. This is ensemble acting at its best as we encounter others in this camp, all of whom have their own ways of surviving such mistreatment, until, of course, the inevitable occurs when this love-in-action endeavor leads to suicide.
More than a few difficult scenes may require you to turn away. One such scene — a rape — compels the action of the entire film.
Take a look at this map that identifies the states where gay conversion therapy on teens is still permitted; Florida is still one of the 36 states that allow the sexual-emotional equivalent of a lobotomy in order to erase evidence of same-sex preference.
Lucas Hedges is revelatory as the teenager who hopes to pray the gay away, to remove that confusion, guilt and torment that separates him from his parents and his God. This fine young actor will soon enough be up there in the actor’s pantheon, as Kidman and Crowe are now, for his performances in Manchester by the Sea (Oscar nominated) and Lady Bird, and now this role as a loving, dutiful teen trying to reconcile his deep feelings with what his conservative Baptist church, and minister father, says will make him burn in Hell.
His homosexuality is, at camp, one more in a litany of of infractions, along with abortion, drug abuse, gambling, alcoholism, porn, masturbation, domestic violence and gangs — and the boys must create family trees and identify family members who have committed such infractions. They're taught to vent their rage at their fathers specifically for being weak themselves in "allowing" their sons to be gay. Jared learns, along with militaristic drills to force gay boys to "man up," how to shake hands like a man, what to read (specifically not Lolita and The Picture of Dorian Gray), and what to confess and what to repress.
The boy is exhausted.
Even while you ache for Jared and his mistreatment, you also wanted him to be more forceful in fighting back in rejecting his parents’ pressure and the camp director’s toxic masculinity and homophobia. But that takes time and maturity and experience. Lucas Hedges brilliantly conveys this growing awareness of his own power to determine his destiny.
Cherry Jones has a cameo as a small-town doctor. Jared's parents have asked her to take blood samples and test Jared for his testosterone levels, as if that were a clue to his same-sex desires. She tells Jared he's free to decide who he is. And ultimately, Jared's mother must decide between her son’s well-being and her husband’s shame.
Conversion therapy is harmful at best and hateful at worst. In a coda at the end of the film, we hear an estimate that more than 700,000 LGBTQ teens and adults have undergone this “therapy.” And there's more delicious irony in the coda, but I won't spoil that for you.
Director Joel Edgerton was right when he said, “With all the uncertainty in our world, this film aims to change minds, open hearts and ultimately save lives. Boy Erased is a love story to everyone who chooses to show love and kindness despite their differences.”
Ben Wiley taught literature and film at St. Petersburg College. At USF/Tampa, he was statewide Director of the Florida Consortium/University of Cambridge (UK) International Summer Schools. His interests are film, books and kayaking Florida rivers. He also writes the BookStories feature in Creative Loafing Tampa. Contact him here.
This article appears in Nov 15-22, 2018.