Love, Simon

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Let me take you on a journey. Or perhaps I should call this review, “how I learned to relax and love Simon.” My first red flag was that the theater was filled with adolescent girls. I was one of 3-4 adults and one of maybe 2-3 men. At one point in the film, the titular Simon (Nick Robinson, from another YA film, “Everything, Everything” and “Jurassic World”) refers to his choice of a Jackson 5 song as “twee.” That struck me as everything wrong with this movie. No kid uses the word “twee” and, in fact, his use of that word pointed out just how twee the entire film was. This is the type of story that has no footing in the real world. Nobody acts like they normally would. The kids are all too cool, clever, and self aware. The adults are impossibly wise, hip and (yes) self-aware. None of the adults talk to these kids the way real adults do. This is especially true at the school, where the vice-principal (the always funny Tony Hale from “Veep” and “Community”) and drama teacher (Natasha Rothwell) act in ways that are much more designed to make the audience laugh than to be remotely believable. This is a perky, happy community, where even the bad kids are laughably bad at being bad. Director Greg Berlanti (from most of the WB’s superhero shows) has made a clear choice to eschew realism for sentiment. You see, Simon is a young man struggling with his sexuality; he does not want to ruin his perfect life by letting his family and best-friends know he’s gay. But then another student announces anonymously on the school social media site that he is gay. They begin to correspond, both using pseudonyms, and Simon falls in love with this unknown person. It is an interesting conceit because the audience becomes invested in who it might be. But the entire film is just a build up to that final reveal, with everything along the way existing to check various humorous or sentimental boxes, without exploring anything remotely close to truth. In fact, when it gets it’s closest to truth (when Simon makes a series of really selfish choices), it takes the easy way out, allowing for a pat solution, rather than exploring the difficult, real-life consequences of those choices.  Sitting in the theater, thinking about films like “Moonlight” and “Call Me by Your Name” that tried very hard to get at something real, I found myself annoyed by the artifice. But then, something started to happen. I became invested in the emotional arc the film was taking. Despite myself, I liked Simon and I wanted things to work out for him. I was as invested as those thirteen-year-old girls (well, maybe not “as invested.” Let’s just say “invested”) in finding out who “Blue” was. The ending was unbelievably sentimental and phony and a little bit silly and it worked. I was swept up in those final moments, maybe partly because the entire theater had erupted in squeals, clapping, crying, and full-on Beatlemania screaming. Or, maybe, just because it was done well. And it occurred to me that Berlanti had made the perfect YA movie. I was never the audience, but it still managed to affect me. I think that says something. Halfway through the film, I was taking mental notes at how annoyed I was. But, I walked out of the theater emotionally spent and feeling oddly nostalgic for the passion of youth. I can’t really hate a movie that took me there, no matter what the journey was like.