Disclosure: for those of you that haven’t watched the all-telling trailer nor have read the book, this review has potential spoilers.
The cookie-cutter rom-com that is “Love, Simon” is the kind of representation that the queer community has been asking for from mainstream Hollywood.
As a generation, we’re used to seeing heterosexual couples in their teens experience a story we all hope for ourselves and very rarely do we see the same stories for gay couples without some kind of tragic ending.
Simon Spier, played by Nick Robinson, is, on the outside, the typical high school senior with best friends and a perfectly loving family.
On the inside, however, we see a maturing adolescent who’s struggling with his sexuality and keeping it a secret.
When Simon makes an anonymous online friend his life becomes not so perfect and the nightmare of his secret being exposed to the school becomes a reality.
The story is set in present day and the events are very true to what students experience in schools.
From the quirky vice principal to the students on their phones, this movie captured a real snippet of what it’s like walking down a high school without exaggerating for humor.
Jennifer Garner and Josh Duhamel play Simon’s parents. Their roles are humorous as progressive parents yet beautiful in their acceptance of their son’s sexuality. More than just a voice of reason, their personal love for Simon is something every person who struggles with their sexual and/or identity wishes for.
Jessica Langford, Alexandria Shipp and Jorge Lendeberg Jr. played Simon’s best friends. The characters’ friendship with Simon gets rocky and people can relate to the feeling of being alone when it seems like the world is falling apart.
The story doesn’t really allow for the problem to be solved in a practical way. But instead of being a form of lazy writing it actually shows how easy it is to not make such a big deal of problems that can solve themselves by just giving each other some space.
The movie is already being praised on social media due to its diverse ethnicities in casting and the specific roles they play.
However, with only making about four million dollars in its first weekend, the prediction numbers are low for how much it’ll earn domestically, let alone worldwide, since the homosexual theme will cause the movie to be banned from some countries.
There’s no doubt that the majority of millennials will enjoy the movie with its progressive stance on LGBTQ+ representation in the mainstream media.
Alone, this movie couldn’t challenge the Hollywood myth that stories about minorities will fail.
But alongside other monster blockbusters with the same representation such as Black Panther and award-winning movies like Moonlight, this movie could help the movement shatter the myth.
Overall the movie deserves four out of five stars for its witty yet realistic dialogue, the timely plot of the story in our society and the feeling of ‘love wins’ that’s showed towards the ending of the movie.
