The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
‘Simon’ says something
Insightful teen rom-com handles story of closeted teen with grace
It feels like they got it right.
If you’ve never been a closeted gay person in high school — and if your high-school years are now a fairly distant image in your rearview mirror — it’s hard to say with any real authority that the makers of the teen rom-com “Love, Simon” handled its subject matter with care, respect and intelligence.
But it sure feels like they got it right.
The credit no doubt starts with Becky Albertalli, whose 2012 young adult novel “Simon vs The Homo Sapien’s Agenda” is the basis for the movie and won the William C. Morris Award for Best Young Adult Debut of the Year and was included in the National Book Award Longlist.
It has been adapted for the big screen by a team that includes some small-screen talents — TV director Greg Berlanti (“Everwood, ““The Flash,” “Riverdale”) and TV scribes Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker (“This Is Us,” “About a Boy”). They’ve made a film with a pretty big heart.
The movie’s namesake, teenager Simon (Nick Robinson), has a pretty good life, complete with loving high school-sweetheart parents (Jennifer Garner and Josh Duhamel) and a little sister (Talitha Bateman of “Geostorm”) with designs on becoming a chef and who thus cooks a lot. He also has two great longtime friends in Leah (Katherine Langford) and Nick (Jorge Lendeborg Jr., “Spider-Man: Homecoming”), as well as a third friend, Abby (Alexandra Shipp, “XMen: Apocalypse”), whom he’s known only for months but who feels like another longtime pal.
What’s challenging for Simon is he is hiding his homosexuality from his friends and family, even though it doesn’t truly seem as though any of them would have a problem with it. Sure, his dad makes a couple of jokes about how the current star of “The Bachelor” seems “fruity” and a “one-man pride parade,” but you never get the sense his son’s lifestyle would make him change the way he feels about Simon. And, yet, that Simon still chooses to hide this side of his life feels completely believable.
Things begin to change for Simon when Leah alerts him to an anonymous post on a blog contributed to by their school’s students — she keeps up with all the gossip on the site for the gang — by a person claiming to be a closeted gay male. Simon immediately ends his FaceTime session with Leah and devours the post.
The writer, who goes by “Blue,” leaves a GMail address to contact him, and Simon does, using the alias “Jacques.” The two write back and forth, feverishly at times, and Simon becomes increasingly attracted to the person on the other end. He begins to generate “Blue” candidates at the school and hints the two should meet, but Blue is not brave enough to do so.
Matters are complicated by another student, Martin (Logan Miller), who discovers Simon’s secret and leverages it against him. You see, Martin is in a school theater production with Simon and Abby and demands the former must help him win the affections of the latter, who, by the way, pretty clearly has feelings for Nick. (Yes, Martin is kinda the worst — but in an at least semi-believable way that helps the movie work. Thanks in part to the portrayal by Miller, of “A Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse,” you can’t quite hate Martin as much as you feel you should.)
As Simon tries to navigate all these tricky waters, he isn’t always perfect, which helps give “Love, Simon” some resonance. Like many of us, he can get so wrapped up in his own drama that he doesn’t see how his actions affect those around him.
While he doesn’t set the world on fire, Robinson (“Jurassic World”) is compelling enough in the lead role, and Katherine Langford builds on the nice work she did as the girl at the heart of the Netflix hit series “13 Reasons Why.” The cast here is appealing as whole, down to Garner (“Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day”) and Duhamel (“Transformers: The Last Knight”). Oh, and Tony Hale — absolutely hilarious in “Arrested Development” and “Veep” — scores some laughs as the school’s principal, who awkwardly tries to bond with Simon.
In the hands of Berlanti, Berger and Aptaker, the story hits a couple of bumps, but they are minor. Heck, they even manage to pull of its big, cheesy romantic-comedy ending.
Scrape away its subject matter and the potentially insightful “Love, Simon” is a pretty simple movie. Hey, it definitely gets a bump for its handling of Simon’s sexuality and all the emotions and decisions that stem from it.
That just feels right.