3/27/2023 0 Comments Love simon![]() ![]() Historically, "coming out" stories in the movies have involved their own kinds of cliches: torment, tragedy, parental/societal rage, fear of disease, and sometimes even death. "Love, Simon" is filled with humor-in its characters, dialogue, and situations-but it doesn't sacrifice emotional depth. ![]() Screenwriters Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker (whose shared credits include "This Is Us" and " About a Boy") have a great ear for the undulating rhythms of comedy and pathos. She says, in one of the many wonderful lines in the film, "I am the kind of person destined to care so much about one person it'll nearly kill me." This is how sensitive smart teenagers talk. There's one scene where Leah shares with Simon how she always feels like she's on the outside looking in. He understands teen neuroses, and cares about teenage experience, its intensities, its depths, how important romance is to the teenage kids engaged in it. The stakes could not be higher.īerlanti, who brought us "Dawson's Creek" and "Riverdale," knows this teenage territory extremely well. If Martin reveals the correspondence to the school, as he threatens to do, then Blue will be scared away for good. His manipulations lead to enormous confusion, hurt feelings, emotional chaos, with Simon rationalizing it all to himself as doing what he has to do to protect Blue's identity. Simon becomes a reluctant hidden puppeteer of the ever-shifting extremely-fraught landscape of various high school romances involving Leah, Nick and Abby, people who are supposed to be his best friends. ![]() He finds out about Simon's secret correspondence and blackmails Simon into helping him get a date with Abby, who wants nothing to do with him. Things get weird when fellow Drama Club member Martin ( Logan Miller) enters the scene. The romantic feelings come out of a soul and heart connection. One of the beautiful aspects of "Love, Simon" is that the intimacy blossoming between the two characters is based on how much they come to care about each other, how much they support one another's journey. There are many potential candidates, and as Simon drifts from one to the other, wondering, "Are you Blue? Are you?" It could be any one of them. The identity of "Blue" is the cliffhanger of "Love, Simon," and Berlanti has a lot of fun keeping us in suspense. When someone with the alias " Blue" writes a post on a popular local message board about being afraid to come out as gay, Simon reaches out privately, using the alias "Jacques." The two kids start a correspondence, hesitant at first and then increasing in intensity. He also resents having to "come out" at all (which leads to a very funny sequence imagining kids having to come out as heterosexual to their devastated sobbing parents). He is afraid, instead, of how it will change everything, how people might perceive him differently. He is pretty sure his parents would be fine with it and his friends would be okay too. Nothing is wrong, except, as Simon says in voiceover, "I have a huge-ass secret." His secret is he is gay. His best friends are Leah ( Katherine Langford), Nick (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) and Abby ( Alexandra Shipp). He's a good student and participates in the Drama Club. As Simon ( Nick Robinson) tells us in his opening voiceover, he lives a normal life "just like you." He lives in a nice house, has two supportive parents ( Jennifer Garner and Josh Duhamel) and a young sister obsessed with "Top Chef" (Talitha Eliana Bateman). ![]()
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