The Aristotle and Dante movie sands the important edges off a queer love story

polygon.com:

Every team behind a book-to-film adaptation has hard choices to make. But one of the trickiest elements is taking a book that’s very much embedded in a character’s head and putting those moments on screen in an interesting way. Voice-overs can only go so far in conveying the way authors capture specific thought patterns.

That’s the chief challenge in adapting a book like Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s 2012 YA queer coming-of-age novel, which soars on the page because of the main character’s internal monologue. The film adaptation from Hara Kiri director and writer Aitch Alberto stumbles a bit in conveying the book’s adolescent angst and poignant longing, often feeling like a collection of snapshots instead of one cohesive movie. Nevertheless, the lead actors carry the film, and the individual scenes are strong, though it never quite captures the deep longing that is threaded throughout the original.

[Ed. note: This post contains some spoilers for the movie’s setup.]

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe follows Aristotle (Max Pelayo), who prefers to go by Ari. He’s a brooding, lonely teenage boy who by chance meets cheerful, self-assured Dante (Reese Gonzales) one summer at the pool. In spite of their differences, the boys strike up a fast friendship that’s threatened by various roadblocks, including Ari’s internalized self-loathing, Dante’s family moving to Chicago, a terrible car accident, and the conflict between Dante’s self-assuredness about his own sexuality and Ari’s hesitance. Mostly, though, the movie is about Ari’s process of learning to accept himself.

In the book, Aristotle thinks. He thinks hard. He’s plagued by nightmares, and he