Borges And Me Review: Turtletaub's Literary 70s Road Trip
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- Marc Turtletaub directed 'Borges And Me,' adapted by Oren Moverman and Parini himself, based on Parini's real 1971 enrollment at the University of St. Andrews to pursue poetry.
- Fionn Whitehead plays Parini, a young American haunted by cassette tapes from his brother Billy, who enlisted in Vietnam after Parini inadvertently inspired him — tapes that grow increasingly bleak as Parini seeks a mentor.
- Alan Cumming plays academic Alistair Reid, whose departure from Scotland strands Parini with his house guest, Jorge Luis Borges (Luis Gnecco), a 72-year-old blind Argentinian poet who insists on joining the planned trip to Orkney.
- Peter Mullan plays reclusive Orkney poet George Mackay Brown, whom Parini's tutor dismisses as unsuitable study, saying 'We prefer our poets dead in Scotland' — yet the anticipated meeting between Borges and Brown never happens on screen.
- Freya Mavor plays a well-read hotel worker whose crush arc pushes Borges out of the narrative after a Loch Ness stop, draining momentum before the film recovers at the Battle of Culloden site, where Parini and Borges summon rebellious ghosts — the rare scene where the film bends toward Borges' metafictional genius.
- A closing title card asserts 'almost everything' in the film is true 'to a degree,' though the reviewer argues that disclosure belongs at the start, since Borges' epigrammatic speech ('I believe in everything') makes him seem hallucinatory — possibly not even real — until then.
Why it matters: The film's central irony, that its two literary giants share almost no screen time together, is the structural flaw that prevents Turtletaub's literary playfulness from fully landing; for an Edinburgh Out of Competition slot built on the Borges name, never delivering the meeting of poets is a missed dramatic payoff that limits the film's reach beyond festival cinephiles.
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