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 a novel I read a couple of years ago, well before I knew that a movie based on the story was in the process. I enjoyed the book, and when I saw that the cast was to include Edgerton, Lucas Hedges, Nicole Kidman, and 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 controversial. When I read the book, I was not dissatisfied with the ending but felt rushed quite a bit. Boy Erased was 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 ultimately failed to impress. A film that should have been ripe with emotion left me completely unaffected.
Category Archives: Joel Edgerton (D)
The Gift (2015)
Joel Edgerton’s (Warrior, Exodus: Gods and Kings) The Gift is easily the surprise hit of the summer. Creepy and suspenseful, this movie is a clinic in developing characters and fully entrenching viewers in the storyline. I saw the film in a theater that was 75% full, and you could hear a pin drop during its quieter moments. Everyone was all-in on the story, and nobody seemed to know where it was headed because of the oohs and aahs at each new twist. Given its 93% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I did not doubt this movie would be good. However, I did not watch a preview beforehand (on purpose), nor did I know anything about the film other than what someone said the night before my viewing that they had heard it had a crazy twist.