GUEST POST: The Miseducation of Cameron Post

So today I have a guest post coming to you from my friend and work colleague Giordana Russo, who was lucky enough to see The Miseducation of Cameron Post at an early screening and write about for the blog.

Giordana Russo is an aspiring storyteller and screenwriter. She’s a proud geek with a love for films, video games, graphic novels and books; as long as it has an intriguing story and interesting characters. Representation is very important to her, one of her main interests and a strong theme throughout her creative content.

I hope you enjoy her review!

The Miseducation of Cameron Post will be out in UK cinemas August 31^st, but I had the pleasure to attend a preview screening at The Watershed in Bristol, which has ultimately lead to this review, so here we go:

Directed by Desiree Akhavan, the film is set in the early 90s and follows Cameron (Chloe Moretz), a teenager who gets caught kissing another girl, Coley Taylor (Quinn Shephard), at the prom. The aftermath sees Cameron being sent to God’s Promise, a conversion therapy centre, by her very Catholic Aunt (Kerry Butler).

The film is an adaptation of the book written by Emily M. Danforth, it follows Cameron’s sexuality exploration from her early teenage years; the film mostly covers the third act of the book focusing on the conversion therapy, with a few flashbacks here and there to provide context.

The first point I want to highlight is how despite the intense nature of this subject, the film surprisingly manages to create several light hearted and comedic moments throughout its run. This plays positively for the portrayal of the characters, even though they’re in conversion therapy, they are still very much teens and behave as such. I appreciate this element for different reasons: one is that it doesn’t let the film fall into a cliché, it’s not uncommon to see LGBT+ films be overwhelmingly tragic, and although this film has its fair share of drama and tragedy, it’s cleverly balanced by its more light-hearted side. It also adds layers to the characters; the way Cameron deals with this situation changes throughout the films and causes several of these comedic moments.

Talking about characters, they are both a strength and weakness of this film. A range of very interesting characters is presented: Cameron is our protagonist, a girl in the middle of figuring out her sexuality and struggling to do so due to her repressive environment, she ultimately goes along with things even if she doesn’t agree with them. Then there’s Adam Red Eagle (Forrest Goodluck), a fellow disciple (a term given to God’s Promise students). Adam is a Lakota, a Native American Tribe, and his character gives a bit of insight into this culture and how they may view people like him. Then there’s Erin (Emily Skeggs), another very intriguing character, who deals with sexuality and gender identity but is fully committed to changing, she truly believes she’s capable of conversion. God’s Promise founders are themselves interesting, particularly Rick (John Gallagher Jr.), an “ex-gay” who’s now trying to help people who’re going through the same struggles as he did, as he was helped by his sister Lydia (Jennifer Ehle).

So we have a good list of characters, each with their own unique background and personalities, and here’s where the weakness of the film is: unfortunately none of them are explored beyond that initial introduction, least of them is Jane (Sasha Lane), another disciple with dry humour and what seems to be a tough background, but while we know why everyone else got sent to God’s Promise, we never quite grasp why she’s there too, all we can do is guess but if the other characters didn’t get much development, she got even less. I call this a weakness, but it can be debatable as it’s not fully the film’s fault, it is hard enough to adapt a book (or a section of it) in a film that is only 90 mins long, and The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a particularly rich book, as we can see from the amount of characters the film alone has.

Briefly, a few other positive points that I want to mention but won’t dwell on are the cast’s performances, each actor shined in their role, doing their best to bring to life their characters and their complexities and the fact that the film didn’t portray the Catholic characters as caricatures. What I mean is that it’s easy to paint such characters as evil, but in fact these type of people often do believe that what they’re doing is good, something that is taken into consideration in this film and so we get to see them as vulnerable people too, instead of seeing just one side of them. Music is not often used but is strategically placed in significant moments for emphasis and as for cinematography, nothing particularly stood out to me, but it serves the story well with hand held movements used for the same reasons as the music is, together with cold colours to elevate the bleakness of the situation.

The end is quite abrupt; it’s preceded by a few poignant events and what could be called the climax of the film. The problem is that it doesn’t feel much like a climax but more like part of the events that are building up to it. Therefore, when the end comes, it feels quite underwhelming and as if more was meant to come after. So far, I’ve tried not to compare this film to the book, it is an unfair comparison but as both end similarly, I do have to at least say that the book handles the end much better, an end that would’ve worked well even in the film.

Overall, The Miseducation of Cameron Post provides a good point of view of some terrible situations, representation that was long awaited and very welcome, and does so through a balanced use of drama and light-heartedness which subverts a few tropes seen in similar content. It is a very solid film with great performances and witty writing, I personally do recommend this film to anyone and I also recommend the book which contains an even larger and richer world.

Rating: 3.5/5

I hope you enjoyed this guest review from Giordana. If you want to check out more of her work then head over to her YouTube page Nameless Planet. 

Thanks for reading!