SIMON DOESN'T SAY

New in the multiplexes this week:

Love, Simon--The title character is an upper-middle-class suburban kid with a loving, supportive family, adoring friends and a bright future. The angst in this teen-angst comedy-drama comes from Simon's self-described "huge-ass secret": he's gay.

Simon (Nick Robinson) exchanges anonymous blog posts with "Blue," another closeted kid at his school, and gradually falls in love with him, as he tries to figure out which of various "suspects" Blue might be. Meanwhile an obnoxious classmate (Logan Miller) stumbles upon Simon's secret and uses it to blackmail our hero into playing matchmaker with Simon's friend Abby (Alexandra Shipp), even though his pal Nick (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) is also in love with her. Simon capitulates, and wacky but painful complications ensue.

If these plot mechanics sound contrived, that's how they came across to me, as well. Those of us who haven't had to face the prospect of such a disclosure ourselves might naively wonder why a well-adjusted, well-protected, principled kid like Simon is so leery of coming out to his family and friends in this day and age. Even allowing for this country's reactionary social ugliness of the last year or two, it seems like such a revelation isn't remotely the earthshaking crisis it would have been even a decade ago, at least in Simon's class and domestic circumstances.

Indeed, the script, by Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker (from a novel by Becky Albertalli), gives Simon some narration addressing his reluctance in amusing terms--his resentment, for instance, that straight kids don't have to come out. But the performance of Nick Robinson makes this gratuitous. Lightly, with no histrionics, Robinson gets across a wary melancholia and tension under the surface of Simon's quiet good nature. He makes us understand what a huge-ass deal it would be to define one's identity in a non-default category, regardless of support system.

Beyond Robinson's excellence, Love, Simon is some fairly typical teen stuff, briskly directed by Greg Berlanti and pleasantly acted by an attractive cast. Jennifer Garner has become quite adept at playing sensible, gently fretful suburban moms, and she's effective again here, while Josh Duhamel is believable as Simon's softie dad. As is so often the case in movies of this sort, the high school staff roles are used as opportunities for goofball character actors, in this case Tony Hale as the anti-cell-phone crusader principal and Natasha Rothwell in a terrific turn as the wound-up director of the school play.

The writing is a bit facile at times, like when Simon assures us that he and his friends do what anybody does, like watching "bad  '90s movies." This seems less a reflection of what kids actually do nowadays than of filmmakers who want to use cultural references from their own youths rather than that of their characters.

But in a sense, the conventional, by-the-numbers aspects of this movie are what make it significant. I'm far from trying to suggest that LGBT people have attained anything resembling full social acceptance, of course. But when I imagine how mainstream American audiences would have reacted thirty, twenty or even ten years ago to a movie that ended with two high-school boys sharing a romantic kiss, as opposed to the routine way it was received by the screening audience with whom I saw this film, it's hard not to feel that a real shift in attitude has occurred. Love, Simon is no big deal, and that's kind of a big deal.

BATMAN BEGINS

New this week:

Dracula Untold—It’s hard to believe that there are any versions of the Dracula myth that remain untold. There have been earlier origin stories—the slightly underrated Dracula 2000 offered a particularly audacious and amusing one, for instance. But this may just be the first Dracula movie to suggest that the Count embraced vampirism in a spirit of noble self-sacrifice.

Set in the 1400s, Dracula Untold depicts Vlad Dracula, played by the pleasantly studly Welshman Luke Evans, as a gallant warrior-prince who loves his waiflike wife (Sarah Gadon) and his stouthearted son (Art Parkinson). Sure, he used to be called “Vlad the Impaler” for his treatment of his enemies, but now he just wants to protect his beloved Transylvania from the Ottoman Turks, by whom he was enslaved as a Janissary when he was a boy. He’s a reformed impaler, you see.

When the Turks show up at his castle, in the middle of Easter dinner no less, demanding, along with their usual monetary tribute, a new legion of boy slaves including Vlad’s own son, the Prince takes to a mountain cave where he once had an encounter with an ancient, desiccated vampire (Charles Dance). This old fiend gives him vampiric powers sufficient to bedevil the Turks, and if he can refrain from slaking his thirst for blood for three days, he’ll become human again, no harm no foul.

Everything goes smoothly. Vlad, family and country live happily ever after.

Just kidding. All manner of melodrama ensues. It’s about as historically convincing as a Ren Faire, but then, unlike life probably was in actual medieval times, Ren Faires can be fun.

So, despite a few missteps, is Dracula Untold. Some of its flourishes are grandly over-the-top—Dracula doesn’t just turn into a bat here, but a whole swarm of bats—and all are unembarrassed. At one point a groveling character says “Yes, Master”; at another a character flings back his head and howls “Nooooo!” These clichés are executed with no apparent irony, and the audience snickers a little. But we keep on watching.

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day—If you’ve seen Steve Carell’s encounter with the very fake-looking kangaroo in the TV ads, it’s understandable if you’re dreading taking your kids to this movie. Not to worry, Disney’s adaptation of Judith Viorst’s 1972 children’s book favorite is nothing special, but it’s a lot better than its own marketing makes it look.

Alexander, the third of four kids, undergoes various humiliations and social catastrophes on his 12th birthday, and so do his older siblings and parents. Jennifer Garner and Steve Carell are funny as his impatient working Mom and his unemployed, doggedly optimistic Dad. Ed Oxenbould has an everykid naturalness as Alexander, Dylan Minnette is his confident older brother, and Kerris Dorsey, wonderful as Brad Pitt’s daughter in Moneyball, is his theatrical older sister. I liked how they didn’t mindlessly bicker; without pushy sentimentality, the ensemble manages to suggest a loving family.

Plenty of the gags in Alexander don’t work, but plenty do, and director Miguel Arteta sets a relaxed pace and tone that allows the charm of the actors to get across. And the Disney-ish atmosphere isn’t too oppressive—this is, at any rate, the first Disney movie I can recall with an overt penis joke.

The lesson that Alexander arrives at, of course, is that any day among loved ones in which nobody ends up at the morgue or in the hospital or in jail is a wonderful, beautiful, not bad, very good day. You can’t start teaching that soon enough.

GROWING BOY

In the title The Odd Life of Timothy Green, the word “odd” is a bit of an understatement. Timothy is a little boy who grows, in a matter of hours, out of a vegetable garden after it’s been seeded with the wishes of his parents.

Cindy Green (Jennifer Garner) and her husband Jim (Joel Edgerton) live in the small town of Stanleyville, where Jim works in the failing pencil factory and Cindy gives tours in the pencil museum. As the movie begins they’re devastated by the news that they can’t conceive. That evening, with the help of some wine, they attempt to move on with their lives by collaborating on “making” an idealized kid, scribbling what they think he’d be like on scraps of notepaper and stuffing them into a little wooden box, which they then bury in Cindy’s garden.

From this sweet, poignant session of self-therapy, the movie swings into the truly odd. Later that night there’s a freak rainstorm which seems only to fall on the Green’s home, after which Jim and Cindy find a mud-covered boy (CJ Adams) of about ten, calling himself Timothy and referring to them as Mom and Dad, has slipped into the house. Timothy is fully formed, articulate, affectionate, funny. His only peculiarity—well, his major peculiarity—are the leaves that grow out of his ankles. He also has a tendency, when the sun emerges from behind the clouds, to respond by turning and opening his arms to bask in its rays.

What follows is a string of episodes in which Timothy’s apparently magical presence revitalizes his parents and their families, as well as the town. He makes a connection with a beautiful older girl, Joni (Odeya Rush), who acts as a sort of bike-borne guardian angel. Each time Timothy suffers a loss or has a growth experience, he notices one of his leaves going autumnal and falling off.

In other words, this is one of those self-consciously whimsical fantasies in which vague supernatural forces intercede positively in people’s lives; Field of Dreams, Phenomenon, Mr. Destiny and The Family Man are all examples. On the whole it’s a genre to which I’m resistant, not because I dislike fantasy (I love it) but because this particular sort so often seems tinged with middle-class self-congratulation.

That said, it should be admitted that some films of this kind are better than others—less shameless, less mushy—and that Odd Life is at the high end of the spectrum. The director is Peter Hedges, who wrote the script from a story by producer Ahmet Zappa. One can only guess what Ahmet’s late and still-lamented dad Frank would think of the film, but I’d be lying if I tried to claim that I got through without a misty eye.

It’s prettily produced, and the acting is strong. Jennifer Garner gave an excellent performance—the best of her career, maybe—in Juno as a similarly earnest, yearning wannabe-Mom. She’s very good again, and Edgerton, a ringer for the young Tom Skerritt, is pleasant company. The supporting cast is full of pros like David Morse as Jim’s distant Dad, Rosemarie DeWitt as Cindy’s pushy sister, Lois Smith and the great M. Emmet Walsh as a jolly aunt and uncle, Shoreh Aghdashloo as an adoption authority, and Dianne Wiest, Ron Livingston and James Rebhorn as representatives of the “Crudstaff” clan behind the pencil factory (by the way, not since Eraserhead, also about a strange parenting experience, has a movie been this interested in the composition of pencils).

These performers and others give Odd Life texture and vitality and a sense of the messiness of real life, which is the point of the story: The difference between parenting as theory and as scary, scrambling, humbling reality. Jim and Cindy are allowed to concoct a child out of their own best qualities, and they still find themselves using him as a pawn in their own agendas. At one point Cindy says “We didn’t want him to be perfect…we wanted it to be perfect…” “it” being Timothy’s childhood. She doesn’t seem to realize that this is possibly an even more insanely control-freak goal, and that even if it could be attained, the perfection would theirs, not the kid’s.