Title: Love, Simon
Starring: Nick Robinson, Katherine Langford, Alexandra Shipp, Josh Duhamel, Logan Miller, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Tony Hale, Natasha Rothwell, Keiynan Lonsdale, Miles Heizer, and Jennifer Garner
Directed By: Greg Berlanti
Distributed By: 20th Century Fox
Genres/Categories: Teen Romance, Romantic Comedy, Drama, Coming Out
Run Time: 1 hour and 50 minutes
At a Glance: To borrow an overused cliché, this is a must-see, feel-good and triumphant film.
Synopsis: Everyone deserves a great love story. But for seventeen-year old Simon Spier it’s a little more complicated: he’s yet to tell his family or friends he’s gay and he doesn’t actually know the identity of the anonymous classmate he’s fallen for online. Resolving both issues proves hilarious, terrifying and life-changing.
Review: When a book as beloved as Becky Albertalli’s Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda is translated to film, the risk of the movie not being able to live up to the experience of falling in love with that book exists. There’s something intimate about the ability to form our own mental images of characters that dissolves when we see the actors chosen to portray those characters—they might not look or speak the way we’d imagined them, and in spite of ourselves, we can’t help but allow that to color our opinions.
But Love, Simon? This movie doesn’t merely shine. It radiates.
Simon Spier has an idyllic life: a comfortable suburban existence with two parents who are practically perfect in every way—and, more prominently, still adore each other after twenty years of marriage. He has a little sister he sincerely likes too, but Simon also has one big secret he’s only just beginning to wrap his head around, one he’s nowhere near ready to confess to anyone except to those of us who have the privilege of being his incidental confidantes.
Simon is gay.
Among the average, everyday existence of being a teenager with a close group of fantastic friends, Simon discovers an anonymous confession in an online forum made by a guy at his school. ‘Blue’ also has a secret that he’s not ready to confess, and in that moment, Simon discovers the means to be himself and yet keep his identity a secret. In the process of getting to know this stranger, whom he likely sees on a daily basis at school, Simon realizes that he’s falling in love for the first time and we, the audience, get to go on a wild and funny and poignant ride with Simon as he attempts to discover who Blue is without scaring him away. Along with it, we also get to see the awful side of high school life and, for those of us of a certain age, to recall how crappy some of those years really were and how fragile friendship can be when not handled with care.
Nick Robinson’s translation of Simon and the struggles he faces is brilliant, and the first time he speaks his truth out loud to a friend is one of the most powerful and liberating moments in the film. Robinson is handsome and charming and balances his portrayal of the high school kid who just wants to get to the end of his senior year so astutely with the guy who dreams of meeting someone special and falling in love. The fear of coming out and the resulting pathos of his isolation comes across so well, especially in relationship to his loving but hyper-masculine dad, that we are made emotional participants in his struggle. When Simon is outed in a brutal and selfish way, Robinson’s portrayal of that emotional impact is heartbreaking.
One of the more prominent messages in this film is how utterly integral representation is to LGBTQ+ kids. Media and society are saturated with heteronormative images to the exclusion of preteens and teens who are just beginning to realize they don’t fit the outdated sexual/gender mold, and the way the message was presented with a humor that still was delivered in a blunt and serious way was flawless. I couldn’t help but think that if this sort of movie had existed even five years ago, let alone decades ago, how much it would have impacted the lives of so many people. But now we at least get to celebrate the fact that this movie exists in major distribution and hope that it’s only the beginning of much more to come.
As someone who came of age on the films of John Hughes, I couldn’t help but make some comparisons as I was watching Simon and his friends. Hughes revolutionized the teen film genre in the 80s and spoke directly to our fears and anxieties and struggles to find a place to fit in while searching for first love, but where director Greg Berlanti veers from the Hughes mold in a noticeable way is that the adults in Love, Simon have evolved. There isn’t a single obtuse and/or antagonistic adult in this movie—the vice principal and the drama teacher in particular are stellar. Rather, we see the adults as allies, warriors and champions, funny and goofy and totally endearing in some cases, or, in the case of Simon’s parents, loving and supportive, but they are adults who empower Simon to be himself, and while I loved it I also recognized its idealism. I hope someday we will all live up to that ideal for our kids
To borrow an overused cliché, Love, Simon is a must-see, feel-good and triumphant film. It’s inspirational and celebrational. “You get to exhale now, Simon.” And we are cheering you on.
