2018 Film Review: Love, Simon (2018)

Directed by: Greg Berlanti
Written by: Elizabeth Berger, Isaac Aptaker
Starring: Nick Robinson, Jennifer Garner, Josh Duhamel
IMDb Link

What we have here is a warm, well-acted, cheesy, and charming film that feels authentic in much of its character interactions, despite some of the contrivances in how these interactions are forced to come about.

Love, Simon is about the difficulties of coming out, even as the world is going through a transitory phase of acceptance. We follow Simon Spier (Robinson), a senior in high school who has always kept his sexuality under wraps, feeling a combination of confusion about what it means to his understanding family, and the foreboding shadow of stigma, personified by a pair of otherwise pointless bullies. The film spends its entire time with Simon, working things out from his perspective and prudently finding things out about him as he finds them out about himself. It's really critical to the film's success that everything that happens in the film essentially does so from Simon's point of view, and everything that we understand is because Simon does; it makes for an fittingly intimate look in to not just what his sexuality means to the people around him, but what it is for him to fall in love. From the way he asks simple questions with difficult answers like "why is straight assumed the default?" to every step he takes in opening himself up to another just as afraid of the stigma as him, because everything is properly looked at through his eyes, the film makes it easy to feel for the guy.

We get a snapshot of everyone in relation to Simon, his life-long and his new friends that "drink way too much iced coffee", the vice principal who tries and fails unduly diligently to relate to the kids, the loving family with their own individual quirks and attitudes that each ebb and flow as Simon grapples with his emotions. It's not always a whole lot than a quirk, but it's more than sufficient when it fits directly in with how it affects that character's relationship with Simon, and because we spend the entire film in Simon's perspective, it can be effectively humanising. This was especially the case with Simon's father Jack (Duhamel); while just about every character goes through an emotional climax with Simon, giving the film quite a few of them, the one that hits hardest is the one that has the least extra stuff going on around it. Jack is ashamed of himself when Simon confesses, not because of who Simon is, but because of how Jack acted in assuming the opposite, every crude joke between father and son having an entirely different context given this new revelation, and it's the simple communication between the two, sold very much by the acting of both men in the scene, that makes it surprisingly compelling for something so quick.

Much of the other stuff doesn't work quite as well, largely because of the contrivance used to go about creating the film's overload of melodrama. The character of Martin (played with energy by Logan Miller) is a cartoon compared to everyone else, going from simply excessively weird with no self-awareness to making school-wide displays for reasons that feel rushed compared to everything else that's happening in the story. The events surrounding Martin in relation to Simon feel off-key with everything else, and so the moments that need to hit hard because of it land softly even for a Disney Channel-style movie like this one, putting a dampener on the film's heavier moments. Thankfully, this doesn't affect the relationships that have nothing to do with Martin, and in one case is actually helped by him, so the film in all its light camp can still have a very satisfying arc.  

The Short Version: Love, Simon is well made, heartfelt, and appropriately timed. While exceptions are present within, the film is distinctly human in its approach to its characters, and it ultimately makes for very good melodrama-riddled teen romance.

Rating: 7.5/10

Published April 22st, 2018