January 1, 2018 3 min to read

Love, Simon

Love, Simon deserves credit for breaking new ground, but that about all it deserves credit for.

by Zach Saul

Love, Simon is a fantasy about love in the digital age I fundamentally don’t understand or share. Admittedly, this wasn’t movie wasn’t made for me (a 26 year old straight male) - it’s a young adult movie meant to deliver the glitz and glam of popular romance movies to the marginalized and underrepresented. I’ve heard fans of this movie tell me that it’s importance stems from its mere presence at the nationwide box office - regardless of the film’s flaws. However, I would argue that the movie genre it’s parodying (essentially “the fault in our stars” and it’s contemporaries) is too cringe-worthy to be taken seriously, despite good intentions.

To be clear, Love, Simon isn’t a disaster by any means. Nick Robinson (Simon), Katherine Langford (Leah Burke), and Jenifer Garner (Simon’s mother) all delivered memorable performances playing genuinely authentic characters. Its protagonist is deeply likable, and in moments the writing is clever and surprising. Simon’s suburban parents feel like people I’ve met and interacted with before and their reaction to Simon’s secret felt realistic and appropriate.

I think two bigger problems prevent Love, Simon from landing. The first is an obvious one - a good script is riddled with nauseatingly cringe-worthy moments that are distracting and detract from what the movie does well. One example is when peripheral characters we barely know, get on top of a table in the lunchroom and perform a lude, homophobic skit in front of the entire school. I don’t discount the possibility this is a real challenge homosexual high school kids face, but as a narrative device, it just felt lazy and ill-conceived. There’s not really any environmental or cultural context for this type of homophobic behavior (at this point in the movie) in Simon’s school as almost everyone is well-educated, upper-middle class, and accepting of LGBT people. The outburst also felt reductive to me, both of adolescent behavioral dynamics, and of Simon’s experience. I think the filmmakers missed a huge opportunity to talk not only about homosexuality after Simon came out but about homophobia as well.

The second problem is that this movie doesn’t work as a romance film. Love, Simon contains a lot of romance movie tropes, like such as declaring your feelings while standing on top of a table (this happens on more than one occasion) but Blue is absent from almost the entire movie. Had the movie taken a more focused emotional angle and zeroed in on some interesting relationships (one dynamic I I wish they would have explored more was Leah and Simon’s relationship¹) this would have been excusable, but I left the theatre feeling like I just drank a very watered down iced coffee (Simon and his friends drink tons of iced coffee in the movie).

¹I think Katherine Langford has a chance to be a rising star and would be interested to see her exit the young-adult romance genre the way Shienne Woodley did.

The Good: There’s some good writing and clever narrative devices in Love, Simon like showing different “Blue” possibilities from Simon’s perspective as he considered different people in his life as potential candidates.

The Bad: I haven’t read Simon vs. the Homo-Sapiens (the book on which this movie is based), but based on the title alone I suspect big studio executives probably watered down what this movie could have been. It lacks a compelling romantic thread - and contains too many of the young-adult romance movie tropes for me to take it seriously. High School love stories are up against it because the setting feels so familiar and overdone, and Love, Simon is way too ordinary to transcend its surroundings.