After two movies, the jury is still out on Joel Edgerton as a director. After catching fire with 2015’s surprise hit The Gift, Edgerton tried his hand with material based on a true story, adapting and writing the screenplay for Garrard Conley’s novel Boy Erased. To be perfectly transparent, I had extremely high expectations for this film. This was actually a novel that I read a couple of years ago, well before I knew that a film based on the story was in the process. I enjoyed the novel, and when I saw that the cast was to include Edgerton, Lucas Hedges, Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe and that it was already being mentioned in Oscar discussions before it was released, I was more than excited. However, I knew that the topic of this film was a controversial one. When I read the book, I don’t think that I was dissatisfied with the ending, but one that I felt was rushed quite a bit. Boy Erased was definitely one of my ten most anticipated films of the year. And like a few others in my ten most anticipated films of the year (namely First Man), it completely failed to impress. A film that should have been ripe with emotion left me completely unaffected the entire time.
Continue reading Boy Erased (2018) →