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Pride Month Movie Review: 'Boy Erased'

In honor of Pride Month I decided to look at one of my favorite LGBTQ movies.

By Sean PatrickPublished 4 years ago 3 min read
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Boy Erased is a powerful, infuriating, and deeply compelling work. This 'based on a true story' drama, from writer-actor-director Joel Edgerton, tells a very effective story in a straightforward and properly dramatic fashion. The story happens to tap a deep well of disdain in me, not toward the movie, but toward the subject. As a long time supporter of the LGBTQ community, love to my non-binary friends, Boy Erased made my blood boil just as it intended to.

Boy Erased stars Academy Award nominee Lucas Hedges as Jared Eamons, a seemingly typical Texas kid. He plays sports, he has a pretty girlfriend, he has a job at a car dealership and when his dad, Marshall (Russell Crowe), preaches at the local church, Jared is in the front row. However, Jared has a secret: he’s begun having sexual thoughts about men and believes that he may be gay. Confessing this to his father, Jared finds his father fully unprepared to accept what his son has said.

Jared is pulled out of college for a 2 week course in Dallas, Texas at a clinic, of sorts. It’s a gay conversion facility where counselors attempt to turn healthy homosexual men and women into unhappy, repressed and pretending heterosexuals. That’s not how the ‘therapy’ staff sees it, of course, I can't resist editorializing. The idea of Gay Conversion Therapy makes me so angry I can barely see straight. Gay is not something that needs to be fixed or prayed away.

By Stavrialena Gontzou on Unsplash

This is a hard line for me, I realize this opinion makes people uncomfortable but my beloved cousin is a gay man and I love him and if anyone tried to send him to a place like this, I would burn it to the ground. I cannot abide discrimination against gay people. I will not abide it. I won’t accept that gay people have less rights than we straight people. I will not listen to you if you say gay is a choice. I will not allow you to denigrate people like my cousin with your ignorance.

That’s a tangent from the movie but I needed to get that out there. I am passionate about this issue, it’s damn sure personal to me. That’s why I love this movie. It’s personal to the filmmakers, the stars and especially to the people who wrote this story in the first place. The story in Boy Erased is based on the real life experience of Garrard Conley who survived one of these gay conversion therapy place and barely lived to tell.

Conley was subjected to emotional and physical abuse in a place like the one we see in the movie. Conley even had a friend who took his own life because of the emotional abuses inflicted upon him while in one of these insidious facilities. Why is it we think torturing people is the most effective way to fix behaviors we don’t care for? What is it in human nature that drives his horrifying impulse?

Joel Edgerton directs Boy Erased with an easy confidence. Edgerton has found his stride as a filmmaker so quickly we’re left to wonder where he finds time to also be an actor. He’s among the most talented people in Hollywood today as a writer-director-actor and producer. He chooses great material, first the thrilling and ingenious, The Gift, and now this remarkably powerful and deeply affecting drama, Boy Erased.

By Steve Johnson on Unsplash

Edgerton is aided by a cast that is bursting with Oscar flavor. Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman, who plays Jared’s mother in Boy Erased, each have an Academy Award and Lucas Hedges is on his way to winning an Oscar one day, he already has one nomination on his resume. Kidman is perhaps the biggest revelation here as she is stuck in the middle of the storm between the husband and son she loves equally. Kidman also has a powerhouse scene late in the film where she gets real with Jared in vulnerable and beautiful fashion.

The direction of Boy Erased is impeccable and the acting is top notch. Boy Erased was one of the best movies of 2018 but was woefully underappreciated at that time. It’s one of the most emotional and impactful movies on how destructive the hate and intolerance toward our LGBTQ community can be. I have not and I won’t forget Boy Erased anytime soon and that sticky quality, the ability to be both relevant and memorable should give you an idea of just how great Boy Erased truly is.

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About the Creator

Sean Patrick

Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.

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