Love, Simon

seen on 23 April 2018

Greg Berlanti directs Nick Robinson as Simon Spier in a film based on Becky Albertalli's coming of age novel Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda. It's basically an American high-school rom-com with the interesting twist that Simon, the main character, is gay but has not yet told anyone in his family or in his circle of friends. He is, however, exchanging emails with the mysterious 'Blue', another gay student at the school in a similar position.

The emails become increasingly flirtatious, though each boy is comfortable with the anonymity (Simon has also chosen a nom de plume). Matters are complicated when Simon leaves his secret gmail account open on a library computer and Marty, another classmate, reads and photographs the correspondence. Soon Simon is being blackmailed to assist Marty to befriend Abby, one of his close friends.

Simon's discomforts are mostly played for light-hearted fun though he resents the blackmail - but after all he is the narrator of the film and he puts the best light on his actions: all is done to protect Blue's anonymity. The seriousness of his bad faith with his friends is only made clear to him in some very painful scenes between them when the cat is out of the bag, as it inevitably must be in a film of this sort. By comparison the awkwardness of coming out to his parents and sister, though forced at a tie not of his own choosing, is not the worst thing in his life. 

Eventually, being an optimistic film, all is well, Blue revealed, and the two youngsters happily acknowledged as an item. Much is being made of the fact that a major American studio has made a film in which the lead in unproblematically gay, is extremely likeable, and finds happiness against odds that clearly belong in a a sunny film rather than in a searing piece of social realism. It might, however, be the case that the primary audience for this sort of thing (high school students) are beyond seeing what the fuss might be about.

The film is accomplished and warm-hearted. The storyline is in many ways conventional, but that is the point: Simon's predicament is just a variant of the teenager's discovery of identity and of moral responsibility, and not the doom-laden burden to which it has so often been relegated in the past. All the performances are in an easy-going key, even the somewhat cack-handed blackmailer Marty, and the general tone only occasionally slips into too much of a wish-fulfilment glow. The two teachers given attention in the film are probably each in different ways overdrawn or caricatured, but a real effort has been made to get Simon's parents 'right'. Nick Robinson is wonderfully personable as Simon, with sufficient versatility to remain sympathetic during his travails, to be convincing as a friendly and agreeable guy, and to show the real difficulties still involved in saying those fateful 'coming out' words.

It's a really enjoyable film.