Love, Simon, the long overdue gay version of, say, John Hughes’ Sixteen Candles, came out — no pun intended — when one could argue that the world passed it by. When millions protested the insecurity of successfully living through a day in high school, yet another version depicting the eternal teen angst of love and fitting-in seems … quaint.
And it’s a shame because there should be time to acknowledge literal life and death issues and the stuff of day-to-day life, especially for young adults, for whom many things we take for granted are still to be explored and experienced.
For those of us as a certain age, it’s hard to imagine what life might have been like with a film like this 40 years ago. Which is not to say that it was a complete wasteland back in the day but you typically had to squint to find a gay character and almost universally, it was someone to pity. San Francisco’s LGBT film festival in the mid-1980s could barely find enough material worldwide to fill up more than a couple days. And a completely upbeat teen movie? Friends Forever, a small Danish film, is the only one I remember from that era.
Part of that was that — again — the simple of idea of “what’s it like to come out and find love and acceptance?” was overwhelmed by another crisis in the form of the AIDS epidemic. Ironically, of course, while AIDS scared the hell out of us as we were burying mentors and friends, it arguably finally forced the U.S. to acknowledge that we were never going back to a world where most of us were going to live in the closet.
Ironically, too, the knock on Love, Simon is that it is too chaste when Moonlight could win Best Picture and Call Me By Your Name got a similar nomination. (Kids can probably handle more but can their parents? Moonlight and CMBYN were critical but not commercial successes). And, once again, the lead is a cute white guy, although African American actors at least get moments to shine. At least the lead verbally acknowledges his privileged life in the opening set up.
So, maybe we accept it for what it is — a completely mainstream movie for questioning young adults, their allies and their parents. But, I’d also suggest that it also holds a lot of power for any adult who felt alienated growing up. That it generated so much emotion in some scenes came as a surprise to me because, as the saying goes, I probably have clothes in my closest older than these kids.
Love, Simon will likely be a modest financial success given a modest budget but I hope kids (and their parents) coming home from the weekend putting fear into the GOP and NRA will find a little time for something that reminds us of why we fight.