Love, Simon (M). Director: Greg Berlanti. Starring: Nick Robinson, Jennifer Garner, Josh Duhamel, Katherine Langford, Alexandra Shipp, Logan Miller, Jorge Lendeborg Jr. 110 minutes
My first car had at least three previous owners. It was already a second hand bomb when my dad bought it for his own use. He handed it onto my brother, who gave it a truly terrible home spray-job and drove it into the ground for two years before passing it on to me. By the time I wrote it off in a routine fender bender months later it was already pretty much just mobile scrap metal.
As an educated white man, I don't for a second pretend to be anything less than privileged. But even for me there's an immediate disconnect in the opening scene of Love, Simon. The titular hero (Robinson) is shown running out the front door of his family McMansion to caress the shiny new auto his parents have bought him for his 16th birthday. 'I'm just like you,' Simon intones in voiceover. Um, just like who?
The film does attempt to subvert initial impressions. Simon's opening monologue turns out to be the precise wording of a message he will later send to Blue, a blogger from his school who uses the anonymity of the internet to talk about his sexuality. Simon, too, is secretly gay, and he and Blue begin an anonymous correspondence marked by an increasing mutual affection.
The plot focuses on Simon trying to guess the identity of his crush. He fixates on a series of guys (all impossibly good looking, like him) who fill in for the faceless Blue in his fantasies. This is a relatable contemporary experience, and Robinson, who at 23 does a good job of passing for a high school kid, brings a certain emotional truth to Simon's conflict over whether and to whom to reveal his sexual identity.
Indeed Love, Simon, based on Becky Albertalli's novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, does get a lot right. For gay teens and those who known them, the film is vitally affirming. But there's baggage that comes with its treatment of these themes that undercuts its efforts to engage the experience of alternative sexual orientation. Simon may be coded as gay, but he is also explicitly a privileged white man.
As such, in the hands of Berlanti as director, there is a mien of white male wish fulfilment that is hard to