‘Borges And Me’ Review: Marc Turtletaub’s Hallucinatory ’70s Road Trip Is Smart, Literary And Playful – Edinburgh Film Festival
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- Marc Turtletaub directs 'Borges And Me,' an Edinburgh Film Festival out-of-competition premiere running 1 hr 49 mins, with screenplay credits to Oren Moverman and Jay Parini.
- Fionn Whitehead plays real-life American writer Jay Parini, who enrolled at the University of St. Andrews in 1971 to pursue poetry while his younger brother Billy sent increasingly bleak cassette tapes from Vietnam.
- Luis Gnecco plays the blind, 72-year-old Jorge Luis Borges, whom Parini ends up driving across Scotland after academic Alistair Reid (Alan Cumming) departs suddenly—Borges, totally blind since 1955, tells Parini 'You will be my eyes.'
- Peter Mullan plays George Mackay Brown, the reclusive Orkney poet who refuses to leave his hometown and whose stated ethos includes 'a poem is the next best thing to silence'—but the film's long-anticipated meeting between Borges and Brown never actually happens.
- The review calls the film 'smart, literary and playful' but notes that after the road trip reaches Orkney, the film 'has lost a little of its steam,' with only a haunting Battle of Culloden scene tapping into Borges' metafictional genius.
- A title card at the end states that almost everything in the film is true to varying degrees, though the reviewer flags that this disclaimer would have been better placed at the start to help viewers settle into the hallucinatory tone.
Why it matters: Turtletaub's film adapts a real 1971 journey with Whitehead as writer Jay Parini, paired with Gnecco's Borges and Cumming's academic Reid. The review praises it as 'smart, literary and playful' but notes the anticipated Borges-Brown meeting never happens—undercutting the film's central literary premise and its most obvious dramatic payoff.
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