American author Jay Parini’s 2020 memoir “Borges and Me: An Encounter” read as a charming extension of an anecdote any writer would dine out on for the rest of their life: the tale of how Parini, as a college student in the 1970s, was somehow partnered on a winding road trip through the Scottish Highlands with the venerable Argentine literary icon José Luis Borges. Like any good anecdote, it feels healthily embellished — Borges was doubtless a character, but is fashioned on the page into a Character — in ways that director Marc Turtletaub‘s enjoyable, good-natured screen adaptation appears to build upon. As a feature film, “Borges and Me” is perhaps extended beyond its natural capacity: It feels both a tall story and a thin one. But the charm is still there.
Benefiting considerably from the tawny, textured splendor of its Scottish locations — shot with dewy autumnal crispness by DP Christopher Norr — this is mellow, quietly sentimental fare that was ideally suited to its home-turf world premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival. It will likely please plenty more crowds on the festival circuit en route to global arthouse-crossover distribution, assisted by the mixture of British, South American and North American drawcards in a transatlantic co-production. Those include its deliberately mismatched leads: Chilean veteran Luis Gnecco (“Neruda”) as the twinkly genius, and Fionn Whitehead (“Dunkirk”), an actor eternally English in his uprightness but appealingly cast an Anglophile American, as his exasperated minder.
As played by White, the young Parini may be fairly advanced in his studies — as an English literature doctoral student at St. Andrew’s University in Scotland — but he exudes an unworldly freshman quality in his just-askew tortoiseshell glasses and oversized duffel coat. A native Pennsylvanian, and still very much a fish out of water, his shy, sweet earnestness makes him an easy target for good-humored ribbing by his breezily bohemian supervisor, the poet Alastair Reid (Alan Cumming, on pleasingly Alan Cumming form). A scholar of South American literature and a leading translator of Borges’ work, he invites the Chilean to stay with him at his ramshackle coastal cottage; joining them for a day, Parini is both bewildered and a little enraptured by the brilliant, eccentric and sightless septuagenarian visitor.
He’s not, however, prepared to be Borges’ babysitter — which is precisely what he becomes when Reid heads off on a last-minute trip to London, leaving some pointers regarding the writer’s various medications, but not much else. It also happens to be the week when Parini was planning to drive up into the Highlands to interview his Ph.D subject, the elusive and hermetic poet George Mackay Brown (Peter Mullan, in a mischievous extended cameo). Cue a cross-generational odd-couple road trip, with rather more sightseeing detours than Parini had planned for. Borges may not be able to see the scenery, but delights in every scrap of local color, to a degree that the American — tasked with describing everything to his elder, in suitably lyrical terms — finds quite wearisome.
Audiences might relate to some extent. In a sprightly performance rife with oddball mannerisms, Gnecco gives Borges equal parts impish wisdom, earthy vulgarity and childlike wonder, rarely letting a moment’s silence go unfilled with eager chatter. When the virginal Parini — who thus far has read romantic poetry without truly feeling it — hits it off with smart, kindly pub worker Ailith (a wonderful Freya Mavor) and they steal away for a time, the film positively breathes in the old man’s absence.
Borges’ presence accounts for some amusing and even poignant adventures: a bumbling boat excursion on Loch Ness, or a fanciful, hallucinatory visit to a long grassed-over battlefield. But the film’s most affecting moments are its quietest ones, largely centered on Parini and his interior anxieties, which include his less academically-inclined brother’s travails as a soldier in Vietnam. Whitehead gives “Borges and Me” the stillness it needs to avoid feeling mawkish or shticky, but screenwriter Oren Moverman (working from an earlier adaptation by Parini and Ross Clarke) pivots between moments of graceful poetry and others of simpler feelgood sentiment.
The final balance slightly favors the latter: There’s little engagement with Borges’ own writing, for example, though audiences so inclined have the upcoming five-hour-plus documentary “Life of Jorge Luis Borges” for that. (Perhaps the two films’ eventual distributors could put their heads together and work out a complementary release strategy.) Full of warm feeling and fuzzy nostalgia for the porous, knowledge-gathering naïveté of youth, “Borges and Me” treats the author as a general, buoyant, heavily imagined spirit rather than a historical subject, and likably so.
