REVIEW: Boy Erased

Directed by Joel Edgerton
2018 Drama
1 hour 54 minutes
From Focus Features

Starring
Lucas Hedges
Nicole Kidman
Joel Edgerton
Russell Crowe

The mother of the author of the memoir has said how much she enjoyed the film and how on-the-mark she thought Nicole Kidman was playing her.  Perhaps it's a film and a story that only a mother could love because I most certainly did not.

Why did I go?  Well, gee, the cast is pretty irresistible and then, of course, it is gay-themed.  More to the point is its concern with gay conversion therapy, something I am nearly violently opposed to but I figured the film would take an adverse stand on it, which it does.  My problem with Boy Erased is that it is monumentally dull.  The story is dull, the acting (for the most part) is dull and the point of it all is dull. 

It is the story of the 18-year old gay son of a Baptist minister.  Not only does the father insist that the son attend the conversion therapy but I wonder why writer-director Edgerton thought it was a good idea to open the film with the kid starting therapy.  Wouldn't it have been one helluva lot more sensible to give us some immediate backstory?  The fashionable thing these days is to tell stories in a non-linear fashion which is so annoying.  And here, it's just dumb and any possible dramatic impact to the therapy is simply lost.

The therapy scenes made me want to run outside into the cold air and catch my breath.  They are played so low-key and filled with minutiae.  Of course conversion therapy misstates that more widely-held view that people are born gay.  The only thing that is ever learned is how to act on it.  When Edgerton (who is the leader of the therapy sessions) says... do you think football players are born football players, I wanted to throw something at the screen, but I want to ask for my admission price back when no one corrects that Neanderthal thinking.


The film goes through the motions but it never particularly connects on any level.  Why don't we know more about the kid and the parents?  I certainly could have done with a lot more introspection on the main characters and a lot less sitting in the room listening to that monotonous therapy.  There was no center, no heart.

I loved Hedges in Manchester by the Sea and expect to like his upcoming Ben's Back, but here he seemed like he was in a trance for most of the film.  The most exciting part is when he chooses to leave the sessions against the wishes of the organizers and his mother gets her haunches up as well.

Kidman, however, definitely delivers.  Her character has some growth and change as she goes from a woman/wife/mother who goes along to realizing she must take a stand for the son she dearly loves.  Most of her performances are a revelation to me.

I very much like Edgerton but I am critical of his writing, directing and acting this time.  All is just so flat.

Crowe's minister-father is a man who only sees his son as needing to be fixed and their relationship is very sad.  A scene at the end, done for the purpose of mending, woefully falls short of emotion which is precisely what this film lacks.

It is good to see Kidman and Crowe together.  They've been quite public about wanting to find something to do together for quite some time.

I expect word-of-mouth will largely keep audiences away.


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