There are still people who believe homosexuality is a choice. This isn’t even an alarming revelation; in the United States, this is yet another way a lot of people are wrong. Really, really, wrong, and dangerously wrong as some of them control public policy and a few even control teenagers. This is a movie about the latter.
My guess is Cameron Post (Chloë Grace Moretz) wanted to be caught. No, maybe not desired to the point of public indecency, but you don’t have a lesbian make-out session in the back of your ride during the middle of prom without taking a number of chances. Her date and his weak high school Prince-stache are devastated — the moustache looked a little more devastated than the kid, but so hard to tell as there wasn’t much of it. Aw, come off it, dude, at least you have a good story to tell … and a damn good excuse as to why you didn’t “get some” on prom night. Most guys and gals end prom with emptiness and disappointment. What? Who? Me? No, not me at all. Who said anything about my prom? I had a great prom experience. Yessirree, Bob. You know it. You’re the one with the bad prom. Not me. Stop talking about me.
In the aftermath, Cameron is sent to God’s Promise, a minimum security prison facility disguised as a school with the façade of God. The stated object of the schoolcampprison is to pray the gay away. Two stated truths permeate the environment: 1) God makes no mistakes and 2) Homosexuality doesn’t exist. It takes near superhuman ignorance of both theology (assuming you believe in God at all) and biology to champion either of these “truths.” And that’s what many kids from hideously backwards conservative backgrounds are up against today. I digress. Cameron is sent to God’s Promise to stop being gay … and the first thing they do is make her room with a “recovering” lesbian teen. Well, Jesus people, that’s just a terrible idea. You want homosexual teenagers to stop being homosexual? Pair them with opposite sex roommates for a start. What’s the worst case scenario? The boy and girl hook up? Isn’t that what you want? Aw, what do I know? I think homosexuality is natural.
Cameron immediately finds kindred souls in rebels Jane Fonda (Sasha Lane) –yes, you read that correctly- and Adam Red Eagle (Forrest Goodluck). It turns out that Jane and Adam grow and smoke their own weed. There’s some alarm bells, huh? Exactly how long am I gonna be at God camp, anyway? Long enough to put roots down, literally? The established rebels describe their milieu as “having your own Disney villain.” The villain is Dr. Lydia Marsh (Jennifer Ehle), who drops the nice act at the first sign of trouble while making the kids own their flaws. Upon introduction to Cameron, Dr. Marsh plays nice, but flat-out refuses the nickname “Cam” as, according to the doctor, “Cameron” by itself is gender-confusing enough; she then marches over to Adam and physically bands his hair out of his eyes. In their dorm rooms, each prisoner is forced to display and compile their own iceberg: a drawing of an iceberg upon which the teen has to enumerate the ways in which their path has mistakenly led to homosexuality.
The key to this film is Chloë Grace Moretz and I feel a little let down by this performance. We know this is a hit-piece. We want it to be a hit-piece. Gay conversion therapy is wrong. Even, however, were it not wrong, this is something that should be entered into voluntarily and by adults. My version of gay therapy camp is like sending an African-American child t
o black conversion therapy camp. Ok, suppose you truly believe that homosexuality is a choice, not a born physical attribute. Take something I loved as a teen by choice. How about baseball? Imagine sending teenage me to, I dunno, baseball conversion therapy camp so that I could learn how to deny baseball. Suppose I were forced to make a big chart of what led me to love baseball, I had to display the chart, and was told every.single.day that my love of baseball was a sin and I am wrong for indulging the sin of baseball. I think I’d be near livid, constantly. This is the level of quiet outrage I needed to see from Chloë Grace Moretz. For the most part, Cameron is silent and confused. We can tell she doesn’t like what she sees, but there’s a curiosity mixed with it: Am I wrong? Should I be striving for a non-gay lifestyle? I don’t mind the questions, but it’s clear that Cameron is constantly restraining emotional response in the film. As important as this subject matter is, I wanted to see something bigger from the title character.
Parental complicity is the near-hidden-yet-essential part of the evil displayed in The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Nobody joins God’s Promise without being outed and sent up by a household authority figure. Few of the kids are there by choice. If you like, you can imagine this as a cross between Saved! and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Unfortunately, both of those films are significantly better than this one. At the end of the day, I like this film, but much more for subject matter than any particular scene within it.
♪Can’t I be gay
Just a little bit longer
Please be a dear
And it will be swell
Sure, my daddy will mind
And he’ll be so unkind
I won’t get another chance
Once converted
For all time♫
Not Rated, 91 Minutes
Director: Desiree Akhavan
Writer: Desiree Akhavan and Cecilia Frugiuele
Genre: Fast Times at God High
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Closeted teens
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Christians with a very abusive and one-sided version of morality
♪ Parody Inspired by “Stay (Just A Little Bit Longer)
