☆☆☆½
The new film by John Hu-- er, sorry, Greg Berlanti is a sweet, innocent story of a student at an affluent suburban high school who has a secret crush and who constantly has to shoo away the school dork while hoping to fend off the humiliation of young love that goes unreturned. Except at the very, very last minute, the hot hunk shows up and everyone is happy.
Yes, Love, Simon mostly is the plot of John Hughes' Sixteen Candles reworked for the woke generation and given a gay twist that is very, very careful not to be too gay, in the way that John Hughes movies were very, very careful not to be too real. So, gone are the slapsticky grandparents, the offensively Asian foreign-exchange student, the horny dork, the observational comedy of Hughes that seems borderline shocking today.
Instead, we have beautiful parents who live in a home furnished by Pottery Barn, an adorable little sister who is perfectly well-behaved, a classically clean and pretty high school where the teachers are just slightly perturbed by the students (the seething animosity of, say, Hughes' assistant principal Vernon from Breakfast Club or Cameron Crowe's Mr. Hand from Fast Times at Ridgemont High is nowhere to be found here; the teachers are all no worse than mildly bemused).
Love, Simon is, in every way, scrubbed of any possibility of being offensive to anyone, gay or straight, black or white, rich or poor. One of the students lives in an apartment building, but we have to glean that fact from conversation, not draw any inferences from the revelation. All of the students write on and read a blog about the secrets of the high school, but no one seems particularly alarmed at what they read.
When, at one point, Simon (Nick Robinson) shows up drunk after a party, his female best friend (Katherine Langford) staggering upstairs with him, the reaction of his parents (the beatific Jennifer Garner and Josh Duhamel) is to giggle at his state and be proud that they raised a son who is always home by curfew.
In other words, there are no stakes in Love, Simon. None at all, not even the comedic kind that drove Hughes movies in the 1980s. So, when Simon reveals early on that he's got a "huge ass" secret, it's pretty much a given that when he finally tells his friends and family that he's gay, they're going to give him nothing but support and encouragement.
I hope this is how kids are finding the experience of coming out, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Love, Simon is something less than honest about what kids still go through when they're labeled as gay in high school (whether or not they are). The most interesting character, by far, in Love, Simon is an androgynous, flamboyant gay boy named Ethan (Clark Moore), who shares his truth with Simon: His mother won't tell his grandparents that he's gay, and when he goes to visit them every weekend, she makes up stories about all the girls he's dating.
The look of humiliation that crosses Ethan's face during his scene -- one of a handful of genuinely honest scenes in the movie -- made me long to know Ethan's story, to have the film be about this interesting, wounded, defiant boy, not its actual main character.
Though no fault at all of Robinson, who is good-looking, engaging and quite a good actor, Simon is, let's face it, about as bland as they come. His all-hoody wardrobe (an observation Ethan makes, by the way) is his way of hiding behind normalcy. He wants to blend in, to be accepted not for being gay (ostensibly the point of the story) but for being cool and effortlessly charming. For being the popular kid at school.
And that becomes the key differentiator between the classic Hughes movies of the 1980s and this one, which emulates the earlier films with a rather form-fitting precision. Hughes movies were about the outcasts and the rejects, the kids who couldn't act normal to save their lives, who weren't rich or popular, or who had to learn how to exist with those who were. (The sole exception to that is the pure fantasy of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but even that movie gets a little, well, uncomfortable at times.)
Love, Simon is sanitized for your protection. Every one of its kids, even the dorky one, is wholesome and good-looking, breaking the rules maybe a little with a few beers, but not going any further -- there's no hint of drugs or pot or unsafe sex or the general messiness of modern life in Love, Simon.
It is, for all intents and purposes, an After School Special about the importance of coming out and accepting who you are. And on that level, don't get me wrong, it's eminently enjoyable. After the eye-rolling opening scenes of Simon's impossibly perfect home life, Love, Simon settles into a fun and engaging story: Simon has read an anonymous post on his school's blog from another gay student and begins a correspondence, lending the film an unexpected setting in two ways:
First, Simon's letters form a sort of epistolary structure, not exactly common these days, in which he creates a nom de plume for himself and his heartfelt letters about what he's going through are answered in turn. That leads to the second fun twist: It becomes essentially a mystery -- not a murder-mystery, but a "love-mystery" with much the same structure. As Simon tries to determine who is writing to him about being a gay student, he tries to figure out the identity of the person on the other end of the letters.
Getting in the way of that fun plot, though, is the film's continued insistence to come back to Simon's need to come out of the closet and the impact it will have on his life. But we've already determined, just by watching, that the impact will be minimal -- and, indeed, that turns out to be the case.
No one cries. No one screams. No one says they were shocked, or worries about getting sick, or discrimination, or gay bashing, or the Federal government's increasingly intolerant stance on gay people. No one is concerned about what Grandma will think, or whether this will affect college admissions, or any of the things that usually do happen when kids come out.
Love, Simon is desperately sweet that way. It imagines a world in which coming out is not difficult or particularly scary or laden with the fear that everyone, your family included, will reject you.
No, Love, Simon plays it as John Hughes Lite. And it's totally fine. I can't fault the movie for being something it's not. But it tries to play it both ways -- to be a "non-preachy" story about a boy hoping to fall in love, while making more than a few salient points about the importance of being who you are.
And it's just so darned cute and sweet and nice. Which is ultimately the biggest problem I had with it. The world isn't as easy as this. Coming out isn't a piece of cake. I have to believe Hughes or even Crowe would have upped the stakes quite a lot back in the '80s -- that someone's job might be on the line, that the parents might be getting divorced, that maybe there was a college admission that might be rejected, or at least that the rest of the school would shun Simon when he finally came out.
But that's not this film. This movie is only about happiness, about a hope and optimism. In that sense, maybe it's the film that really will benefit some young people, and taken on those terms, it's terrific, maybe even kind of great. The thing is, as a dramatic rom-com or a piece of genuinely compelling cinema, it's something less than fulfilling. It's just too damn cute and perky and adorable. Not bad things, any of them. Just not completely satisfying, either.
When at the end of the film, five characters end up in a car together, and Simon announces he's taking them for "an adventure," you can't help but get the sense they're driving straight toward downtown Chicago, where Ferris is going to put them in a parade and teach them a thing or two about appreciating life.
Love, Simon is a cinematic confection: sweet, tremendously well-made, endlessly appealing, and almost wholly innocuous -- enough to give you a rush of sugar, but in no way close to providing a satisfying, emotionally nutritious meal.
Viewed March 19, 2018 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks
1915
Yes, Love, Simon mostly is the plot of John Hughes' Sixteen Candles reworked for the woke generation and given a gay twist that is very, very careful not to be too gay, in the way that John Hughes movies were very, very careful not to be too real. So, gone are the slapsticky grandparents, the offensively Asian foreign-exchange student, the horny dork, the observational comedy of Hughes that seems borderline shocking today.
Instead, we have beautiful parents who live in a home furnished by Pottery Barn, an adorable little sister who is perfectly well-behaved, a classically clean and pretty high school where the teachers are just slightly perturbed by the students (the seething animosity of, say, Hughes' assistant principal Vernon from Breakfast Club or Cameron Crowe's Mr. Hand from Fast Times at Ridgemont High is nowhere to be found here; the teachers are all no worse than mildly bemused).
Love, Simon is, in every way, scrubbed of any possibility of being offensive to anyone, gay or straight, black or white, rich or poor. One of the students lives in an apartment building, but we have to glean that fact from conversation, not draw any inferences from the revelation. All of the students write on and read a blog about the secrets of the high school, but no one seems particularly alarmed at what they read.
When, at one point, Simon (Nick Robinson) shows up drunk after a party, his female best friend (Katherine Langford) staggering upstairs with him, the reaction of his parents (the beatific Jennifer Garner and Josh Duhamel) is to giggle at his state and be proud that they raised a son who is always home by curfew.
In other words, there are no stakes in Love, Simon. None at all, not even the comedic kind that drove Hughes movies in the 1980s. So, when Simon reveals early on that he's got a "huge ass" secret, it's pretty much a given that when he finally tells his friends and family that he's gay, they're going to give him nothing but support and encouragement.
I hope this is how kids are finding the experience of coming out, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Love, Simon is something less than honest about what kids still go through when they're labeled as gay in high school (whether or not they are). The most interesting character, by far, in Love, Simon is an androgynous, flamboyant gay boy named Ethan (Clark Moore), who shares his truth with Simon: His mother won't tell his grandparents that he's gay, and when he goes to visit them every weekend, she makes up stories about all the girls he's dating.
The look of humiliation that crosses Ethan's face during his scene -- one of a handful of genuinely honest scenes in the movie -- made me long to know Ethan's story, to have the film be about this interesting, wounded, defiant boy, not its actual main character.
Though no fault at all of Robinson, who is good-looking, engaging and quite a good actor, Simon is, let's face it, about as bland as they come. His all-hoody wardrobe (an observation Ethan makes, by the way) is his way of hiding behind normalcy. He wants to blend in, to be accepted not for being gay (ostensibly the point of the story) but for being cool and effortlessly charming. For being the popular kid at school.
And that becomes the key differentiator between the classic Hughes movies of the 1980s and this one, which emulates the earlier films with a rather form-fitting precision. Hughes movies were about the outcasts and the rejects, the kids who couldn't act normal to save their lives, who weren't rich or popular, or who had to learn how to exist with those who were. (The sole exception to that is the pure fantasy of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but even that movie gets a little, well, uncomfortable at times.)
Love, Simon is sanitized for your protection. Every one of its kids, even the dorky one, is wholesome and good-looking, breaking the rules maybe a little with a few beers, but not going any further -- there's no hint of drugs or pot or unsafe sex or the general messiness of modern life in Love, Simon.
It is, for all intents and purposes, an After School Special about the importance of coming out and accepting who you are. And on that level, don't get me wrong, it's eminently enjoyable. After the eye-rolling opening scenes of Simon's impossibly perfect home life, Love, Simon settles into a fun and engaging story: Simon has read an anonymous post on his school's blog from another gay student and begins a correspondence, lending the film an unexpected setting in two ways:
First, Simon's letters form a sort of epistolary structure, not exactly common these days, in which he creates a nom de plume for himself and his heartfelt letters about what he's going through are answered in turn. That leads to the second fun twist: It becomes essentially a mystery -- not a murder-mystery, but a "love-mystery" with much the same structure. As Simon tries to determine who is writing to him about being a gay student, he tries to figure out the identity of the person on the other end of the letters.
Getting in the way of that fun plot, though, is the film's continued insistence to come back to Simon's need to come out of the closet and the impact it will have on his life. But we've already determined, just by watching, that the impact will be minimal -- and, indeed, that turns out to be the case.
No one cries. No one screams. No one says they were shocked, or worries about getting sick, or discrimination, or gay bashing, or the Federal government's increasingly intolerant stance on gay people. No one is concerned about what Grandma will think, or whether this will affect college admissions, or any of the things that usually do happen when kids come out.
Love, Simon is desperately sweet that way. It imagines a world in which coming out is not difficult or particularly scary or laden with the fear that everyone, your family included, will reject you.
No, Love, Simon plays it as John Hughes Lite. And it's totally fine. I can't fault the movie for being something it's not. But it tries to play it both ways -- to be a "non-preachy" story about a boy hoping to fall in love, while making more than a few salient points about the importance of being who you are.
And it's just so darned cute and sweet and nice. Which is ultimately the biggest problem I had with it. The world isn't as easy as this. Coming out isn't a piece of cake. I have to believe Hughes or even Crowe would have upped the stakes quite a lot back in the '80s -- that someone's job might be on the line, that the parents might be getting divorced, that maybe there was a college admission that might be rejected, or at least that the rest of the school would shun Simon when he finally came out.
But that's not this film. This movie is only about happiness, about a hope and optimism. In that sense, maybe it's the film that really will benefit some young people, and taken on those terms, it's terrific, maybe even kind of great. The thing is, as a dramatic rom-com or a piece of genuinely compelling cinema, it's something less than fulfilling. It's just too damn cute and perky and adorable. Not bad things, any of them. Just not completely satisfying, either.
When at the end of the film, five characters end up in a car together, and Simon announces he's taking them for "an adventure," you can't help but get the sense they're driving straight toward downtown Chicago, where Ferris is going to put them in a parade and teach them a thing or two about appreciating life.
Love, Simon is a cinematic confection: sweet, tremendously well-made, endlessly appealing, and almost wholly innocuous -- enough to give you a rush of sugar, but in no way close to providing a satisfying, emotionally nutritious meal.
Viewed March 19, 2018 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks
1915
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