The Miseducation Of Cameron Post

Synopsis: Its 1993 and a teenage girl, Cameron Post (Chloë Grace Moretz), is sent to a Christian gay rehabilitation centre by her guardian.

If you like small scale, psychologically credible films, as I do, The Miseducation of Cameron Post will be a rewarding experience.

Working from a young adult novel by Emily M. Danforth with Cecilia Frugiuele as co-scriptwriter, director Desiree Akhavan delivers a film that is both compassionate and clear-eyed, delving into highly emotional territory with empathy and never straying into melodrama.

Whilst it deals with a group of teenagers Miseducation is not a teen movie as such, even though the more thoughtful amongst that age group will no doubt get much out of it. Rather it deals with fundamental issues of identity and self-determination within the strictures of social expectations, cannily compressing these matters into the microcosm of a self-styled Christian “SSA” (same sex attraction) rehabilitation camp.

What gives the film its strength is that it is not a demonization of its target as a group of holy-rollers bent on saving souls for Jesus, but rather a level-headed recounting of Cameron’s experience, seen through her own eyes. In this respect one suspects strongly that the story is based on Ms. Danforth own experience.

It is a poignant story as the isolated and vulnerable young people struggle, more or less unsuccessfully, to reconcile their disruptive feelings with the requirements of the adults charged, by their misguided parents and guardians, with not the kids' care so much as  their cure. Jennifer Ehle is particularly good as the ever-smiling sanctimonious camp psychologist who with her compliant brother, Reverend Rick (John Gallagher Jr.), run this facility called, with obvious fervour, God’s Promise, and whose approach to their task is not far off the cultish.

Ms Akhavan, no doubt working with a limited budget, keeps the camera close in on her players with Ms Moretz very effective as the quietly self-contained teen who together with a couple of constitutional rebels, Jane (Sasha Lane) and Adam (Forrest Goodluck), forms a small pocket of resistance to the pious brainwashing of their minders and even manages to find some joy in her circumscribed life (notably in the scene in which Cam sings along with the 4 Non-Blondes classic “What’s Going On?”

Low key and unvarnished but with depth and nuance The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a worthy addition to that long line of films that began sixty years ago with Rebel Without A Cause (1955)

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