My favorite teen and I saw last night "Boy Erased," the movie adapted from a memoir about a college-aged gay man, played in the film by Lucas Hedges, who's placed in a "conversion therapy" program by his fundamentalist parents (Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman). Our vice president, to whom I gave a light-hearted pass yesterday, is to his discredit a suspected supporter of this form of child abuse. People who see the movie probably self-select in a way that ensures that the choir will be preached to, but for those of us in that choir, the movie tends to undercut common conceptions about the alleged monsters who subject their own kids to the abuse. The performances of Crowe and Kidman as parents, earnest and loving, though confused, are in this regard stellar--the Kidman character, who stays with her son in a hotel while he's taking the "cure," is the first to have her suspicions aroused, and, though she's accustomed to the role of submissive Christian wife, the movie suggests that her eventual willingness to put her son before her marriage contributes to her husband's more reluctant, wavering progress toward a new outlook.
I was most interested in an economic subtheme. Another thing the movie suggests is that the conversion therapy biz, still legal in 36 states, is beset by a toxic interplay of Christian fundamentalism and garden-variety greed. You can give people lessons on whom to be sexually attracted to, generally or specifically, and augment the lessons with heavy doses of shame. But it doesn't work. So the "treatment" goes on and on. The desperate parents keep shelling out, and a benighted religious purpose is further corrupted by a sluice of cash. In a somewhat understated way, the movie registers something like disgust with what I'll call "straight" American values. Toward the end, the gay son goes to his father's office at work for a hard conversation. Their estrangement is on the verge of becoming irreversible. The father walks behind his desk, looks out the big window, gestures at the wide scene, and announces that he had intended for "all this" to be his son's.
The "all this" is the family's Ford dealership.
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