Caught with another girl in the back seat of a car on prom night, Cameron (Chloë Grace Moretz) is shipped off to an Evangelical ‘conversion therapy’ center to be ‘cured’ while bonding with fellow rebels, through enduring emotional and religious blackmail. Lazy summing up as Junior One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (or Girl Interrupted?) meets The Breakfast Club doesn’t begin to do justice to the poignant, witty and often dark teen drama that unfolds.
Adapted from the 2012 YA Emily M Danforth novel by Iranian-American film-maker Desiree Akhavan and producer Cecilia Fruguiele, Miseducation winds back to 1993 to banish cell phones and the Internet to complete the rural isolation of the God’s Promise ‘therapy’ centre.
Run with chilly efficiency by Jennifer Ehle’s Dr Lydia Marsh, a quack psychologist with a Bible up her you-know-what, her psychobabble sessions are a travesty of trendy, right-on talking therapies, twisted Evangelical preaching and downright emotional blackmail that consists mainly of patronising, shaming, humiliating and bullying confused and vulnerable teenagers. Having successfully ‘straightened’ her gay brother, Reverend Rick (John Gallagher Jr) – tell that to his florid moustache – she is convinced of the efficacy of her methods.
The first thing to make clear, this isn’t one of those ‘coming of age’ movies; rather the protagonists have already come of age, it’s just that the Mid-West Christians have decided they have come of age wrongly and need straightening out.
Hence quirky and lovelorn orphan teenager Cam immediately bonds with the only two cool kids in camp, Jane (Sacha Lane) and Adam (Forest Goodluck), who play along with the programme as a survival strategy; the horror being there is no set jail term, God’s Promise can hold anyone for as long as they think there is risk of ‘regressing’ to homosexuality. Jane stashes pot in her prosthetic leg while and Adam identifies with his Lakota heritage as “Winkte”, or “two-spirit”, to Jane’s smart line “he’s the Native American David Bowie.”
Chloë Grace Moretz’s Cam is an understated and layered portrait; lonely, confused, pitched into self-doubt; the first day on the set of Hugo with then-child-actor Moretz, you knew this was the kind of performance we’d get from her later in her career. Teamed with the sparky and defiant Lane and Goodluck, the three misfits from outside the Evangelical community draw strength from each other, having been abandoned by their own families.
Secondly, agenda set in scene one, this plays out precisely as you expect, with a Cuckoo’s Nest trigger incident setting up an understated last act finale, and no shying from cliche along the way – including an uplifting, life-affirming coming-of-age staple, group singalong.
The point, in no subtle terms, is not a coming-of-age, live, love, learn, come-out-a-different-better-person teen journey; Cam has to learn she is already a different, better person and come out stronger, which Akhavan takes us through with wit, charm and poignancy. RC
The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)
Director: Desiree Akhavan
Writers: Desiree Akhavan, Cecilia Frugiuele
Runtime: 90 minutes
Certification: 15
Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, Sacha Lane, Forest Goodluck, Steven Hauck, Quinn Shephard, Jennifer Ehle