(courtesy IMP Awards)
Adopting any book to film is a fraught exercise but especially so when it is as beloved and treasured as Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, a book about young gay love released in 2012 which has gone to become one of those highly influential books that define and influence a generation.
Or a number of generations, in fact.
The novel was released at a time when LGBTQI+ stories were on the cusp of becoming more widespread thanks to a wide range of issues, and it rode this wave of increasing prominence and acceptance right into the hearts of not just young men and women coming to grips with their sexuality but older members of the group who had done their growing up well inside the closet, and who longed to have a relationship as normal as that enjoyed by the two titular characters.
What is so powerful for older LGBTQI+ people about stories like this, and others like Heartstopper and Milo and Marcos at the End of the World and countless others now well and truly out and proud in the storytelling mainstream is that it gives them the gay youth they never really had when they were Ari and Dante’s age.
Stories like this are vitally important for younger LGBTQI+ people too because they can finally see themselves reflected in the lives of older teenagers just like them who are finding true love but also opposition and challenges and somehow finding a way through.
So, having established how important a novel like Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is to a whole host of readers, the next big question has to be how does he movie convey not just the narrative but the ideas inherent in it?
After all, you’re not just after a ticking of the storylines boxes but also a sense that the novel that came alive in your mind has found full and vivid expression on the big screen too.
The good news is that for the most part, the film adaptation of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe absolutely nails it.
Written and directed by Aitch Alberto, the movie does a good job of giving us all the narrative touchpoints that matter, from Ari and Dante’s fateful meeting at the pool one hot summer’s day in 1987 El Paso, Texas – quiet, angry, self-loathing Ari with the taciturn father and loving mother needs swimming lessons from idiosyncratically avuncular Dante who loves art, hates wearing shoes and adores his adorable parents (all that adoring is very cute and well justified) – to the slow burn the two quite divergent personalities first become close friends and the much, much more, a development which cuts to the heart of this touchingly beautiful and emotionally nuanced story.
It neatly captures what its like for two quite different guys, one who is reasonably happy with who he is and another who is most manifestly not, to find that maybe they have more in common than just their Mexican heritage and a love of swimming in cold pools on searing hot summer days.
Taking a less strictly chronological route with both key narrative moments and particular incidents than the book, and inserting important expositional reveals at points that don’t match the literary timeline but which still work nicely, the film by and large delivers on telling us what young gay love is like for two young men in an age where there isn’t the emerging widespread acceptability that’s was in evidence when the book itself was released.
Where it does stumble a little, and honestly this isn’t fatal and doesn’t detract from the movie in any sort of deeply meaningful way, is in the way it depicts what’s going on in Ari’s head; this is important because while there are two names in the title, it’s Ari that gobbles up the lion’s share of the existential struggling because he’s the one who has to make the longest and most difficult journey from supposed straight guy to someone who might actually want to kiss guys and Dante in particular.
He’s the emotional core of the story and while the film does a reasonable job of getting into his head, some of the narrative developments come across as a little sudden and under-formed because we don’t have the build up to what led Ari to that point.
That shouldn’t be read, even remotely, as the-book-is-better-than-the-movie statement.
This reviewer, while a lifelong avid reader, has long appreciated the qualitative differences between books and films as mediums and as a cinephile into the bargain, knows that expecting a book to be realised fully as a movie is a fool’s errand.
The two will also be different and rightly so, and often, as in say the case of Lord of the Rings, when you have a talented filmmaker working with the material of a gifted writer, the results can be equally as impressive in the new medium as they were in the old.
What needs to be remembered in the case of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is that the film is actually a very sweet, smartly executed and emotionally intelligent undertaking that mostly distills the heart of a very good novel in a reasonably pleasing movie.
It is a success by any metric and you get to the end, happy that these two young men have not just found each other but especially in the case of Ari, found themselves more fully too.
It’s a lovely ride through young love that warms the heart and lifts the spirit with two characters who come to mean the world you, and yes, while it may not be infused with the internal emotional weight and ruminative depth of the book, and lacks a little for that, it is still a worthy and lovely adaptation of a much-loved book and will do an exemplary of bringing this story to a whole new group of people who need to hear its openminded and full-hearted story of love that is love that is love.