Summary
Disarmingly charming, honest, and a frequently emotional. It’s like a John Hughes film if John Hughes had ever cast any overtly gay characters.
It’s amazing that we are still having firsts in 2018. Especially when those firsts are ‘first Marvel Studios film to be led by a person of colour.’ Or the firstly openly trans presenter at the Oscars. LOVE, SIMON is touted as the first major studio film to focus on a gay teenage romance. Which is amazing when there’s been at least four teen romances about a guy who bangs a pie.
Based on Becky Albertalli’s novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, the first relief of director Greg Berlanti’s film is the vastly improved title. Following the eponymous Simon Spier (Nick Robinson), a closeted gay teenage boy, the film is an unconventional coming out story. Communicating via email with a fellow high-school student known only as Blue, Simon is suddenly outed when Martin (Logan Miller) discovers the emails by accident and uses the knowledge to help him get closer to Simon’s friend Abby (XXX).
Once you get past the initial setup, LOVE, SIMON is a fairly straightforward coming of age story. Simon must navigate the pitfalls of high-school, a father (Josh Duhamel) who constantly makes casually homophobic remarks, and the complex relationships of his best friends Nick and Leah (Australia’s Katherine Langford).
What makes this a different journey to most (and here are those firsts again) is Simon’s total lack of a guide on this. While pondering why the default for ‘coming out’ is not for straight kids as well, we also realise how few teen romance films carry that kind of representation. The most memorable teen films, from The Breakfast Club to Dazed and Confused, work because they remind us of the many different types of kids who are going through similar crises. Berlanti’s film proves in its simplicity that there is more than one story that can be told out of a familiar formula.
Nick Robinson is a wonderful lead, and it’s great to see Albertalli’s underdeveloped Leah has been fleshed out more by Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger’s script. Jennifer Garner, as Simon’s mum, is kind of left on the fringes, but as the film reaches a crescendo of emotional talks, she gets a few nice moments in. However, everything about Logan Miller’s Martin is horrible. Sure, he’s meant to be slimey, but he is relentlessly annoying. Tony Hale as Mr. Worth, the vice principal of the school Simon attends, feels like he’s stepped in from another film in an attempt to create a lighthearted 2018 version of Edward R. Rooney.
LOVE, SIMON may not change the world, but it still leaves us a little warmer for having spent some time here. If dozens of copycat films are the result, then that can only be a good thing. The kind of film that leaves you with a sloppy grin on your face.
