‘Love, Simon’: A gay spin on a cliched rom-com formula
Love, Simon may have been elevated to a position of cultural significance due to its 20th Century Fox backing (the last studio movie about homosexuality was I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, and stories of teenagers stirred to come out to their parents after watching it, but in the end it’s merely a movie in which Josh Duhamel tries to emulate Michael Stuhlbarg’s iconic Call Me By Your Name monologue, and fails about as spectacularly as you’d expect. Yes, there’s a level on which I don’t understand why Love, Simon needs to exist. Why must Hollywood pander to audience’s expectations of mediocrity? Why not offer mainstream America films like Call Me and Moonlight and they might love them. Love, Simon operates in a market corner recently reserved for half-hour Netflix comedies and the stuff its director Greg Berlanti exec produces for The CW. That is to say, it isn’t very good.
Lead Nick Robinson is a profoundly uncharismatic bargain bin Ansel Elgort/Tom Holland hybrid who completely fails to imbue the eponymous Simon with the emotionally complexity the character needs. In fact, pretty much everyone in Love, Simon is seriously miscast. Katherine Langford suffers worst: I’m sure her involvement helped get the film greenlit, but a stunning Australian model hardly chameleonic enough to shed that image isn’t the slightest bit believable as Simon’s ‘quirky, awkward’ best friend, no matter how many funky hats they give her. His parents, Duhamel and Jennifer Garner — whose recent big-screen work has largely involved evangelical Christian dramas totally contradictory of Love, Simon’s morals — are just bad actors in general, but they cannot for a second sell the Supportive Liberal Parent schtick. Simon’s whole family environment is incredibly icky — his impossibly adorable sister (Geostorm’s Talitha Bateman) down to the gag-inducing family banter about whether they should watch The Americans or The Affair together. Tony Hale is the wacky school Vice Principal, and though the script lets him down, he’s as fun to watch as always. Alexandra Shipp and Logan Miller are reasonably memorable as two of Simon’s schoolmates, and my boy Miles Heizer from Parenthood has a small role — merely making me wish he was playing Simon instead of Robinson.
Obviously, I’m not the ideal person to comment on how affecting this film may be for gay teens — I am experiencing Black Panther vibes of Not Really Getting The Point — but I would offer that, if Call Me By Your Name is too niche/isn’t as relatable because of its period setting — Ryan Murphy told some great stories about coming out in the modern American high school on six seasons of Glee, a far more cineliterate and smartly-scripted project than Love, Simon could hope to be. Even Jason Katims, who isn’t the best when it comes to LGBT representation, could’ve improved this story with a rewrite. It’s just so painfully unimaginative — essentially a You’ve Got Mail rip-off with a weak mystery element and lots of excuses for the sorts of Game of Thrones jokes that have poisoned mainstream comedy films these past few years.
With Black Panther, my final argument was along the lines of “This is a mediocre, tiresome superhero movie, but at least black audiences can be bored and represented at the same time now”. I’ll say the same about Love, Simon. These kinds of movies are pointless, but it’s just as well to shake up the genders/races/sexualities as often as possible. Seriously, though, just watch Call Me By Your Name instead. Josh Duhamel is nowhere to be found in it.
