Jay Parini's 2020 memoir "Borges and Me: An Encounter" has been adapted into a film that captures the essence of a writer's once-in-a-lifetime meeting with literary legend Jorge Luis Borges, though the resulting picture trades philosophical depth for gentle charm.
The memoir itself recounts a singular moment from Parini's past. As a college student in the 1970s, the American author found himself paired with Borges on an unexpected road trip through the Scottish Highlands. For any writer, such an encounter with one of the twentieth century's most influential voices would constitute career-defining material. Parini mined that experience into a reflective memoir that reads as an extended dinner-party anecdote, the kind of story that sustains a literary career's worth of readings and lectures.
The film adaptation translates this nostalgic encounter to screen, leaning into the road-movie framework that naturally emerges from Parini's account. The pairing of an eager young American writer with the aging Argentine master creates obvious dramatic tension. Borges, a towering figure in world literature whose dense fictions and philosophical essays reshaped how readers think about narrative itself, becomes a character navigating literal and metaphorical terrain alongside his much younger companion.
What the film achieves with affection, it occasionally sacrifices in intellectual rigor. The review notes the picture runs "more perky than poetic," suggesting that the adaptation prioritizes accessibility and warmth over the kind of cerebral engagement one might expect from material centered on Borges. The tension between entertainment value and thematic substance has long challenged filmmakers adapting literary work. A road movie about writers discussing craft, philosophy, and the nature of storytelling requires either visual innovation or sparkling dialogue to sustain viewer interest. The film apparently opts for a sunnier, more conventional approach.
Parini himself carries considerable credibility as both a novelist and biographer. His literary journalism and biographical work on figures including John Updike and Nathaniel Hawthorne have established him as a thoughtful reader of American letters. His connection to Borges, however brief, places him in a particular lineage of writers who encountered the Argentine master during his later years when he taught and lectured internationally despite his blindness.
The adaptation enters a crowded field of literary biopics and literary-minded road narratives. Recent years have seen renewed interest in films about writers and their creative processes, from "Armageddon Time" to various Sondheim and Salinger projects. These films succeed or fail based on whether they find cinematic language adequate to their subject matter. A story about two writers in conversation risks becoming static without careful visual storytelling or exceptional dialogue.
For readers already familiar with Parini's memoir, the film offers a companion piece rather than a supplement. It provides actors, landscapes, and movement to a text that readers have already imagined privately. For audiences encountering this encounter for the first time, the film delivers what Variety's review suggests: a pleasant, accessible entry point into a significant moment in literary history, even if it doesn't quite reach the philosophical heights one might encounter by reading Borges directly.