This past summer there was a film about a young lesbian sent to a Christian 'conversion camp' "The Miseducation of Cameron Post" and in my review I wrote: "Before the film started there was a preview of a coming movie called “Boy Erased” about the son of a Baptist preacher who is forced to participate in a church-supported conversion starring Lucan Hedges, Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe and Cherry Jones. I am hoping this is what I wanted “Miseducation” to be and wasn’t." Unfortunately "Boy Erased" fails in the same way that "Miseducation" did in not going deeper into what happens at these 'conversion' camps except in a fleeting way.

It certainly goes further into the child and his parents with the father being a preacher and the mother and 'obedient' Christian wife. With the father played by Russell Crowe and the mother played by Nicole Kidman, each having their moments, the relationship with their son hits many an emotional note.

Lucas Hedges, as the son, gets every nuance of a boy who doesn't know himself, who goes to a place where people are trying to make him something he isn't. We meet him just before he is sent off to the camp and because the movie is not told in a linear fashion it takes time to find out he was sexually assaulted and his father finding out about that is what starts his going to the camp. Hedges goes through the complete arc of a boy becoming a man accepting himself as he is and expecting others to and if they won't not being in his life.

A cameo by Cherry Jones got applause from the mainly gay audience. Talking about that audience it was one of the biggest crowds I have seen at a matinee without it being a holiday show and most of the after talk in the lobby was about the recent spate of movies being non-linear and photographed so darkly. Also, Joel Edgerton who directed and wrote the screenplay based on the memoir by Gerrard Conley plays one of the camp's therapists carrying on the latest fad of one person doing too many jobs on a film.

The last half hour of "Boy Erased" is worth sitting through the first slow-moving emotionally divorced hour and a half. What positive thing many writers and directors are doing is adding additional information at the end of based on a true story film and this does supply the audience with a lot of information about the results of these camps, what has happened to the people involved and, in this case, how much Russell Crowe looks like the boy's real father!

I am still waiting for a movie to really look at the gay conversion therapy camps, what they do, the physical and emotional abuse they put the children through and all the money they make.

Movie trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B71eyB_Onw