This review was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn't exist.When it comes to novel adaptations, screenwriters and directors always need to do a balancing act between important moments that need to make it to the screen and what gets left behind. This means that, more often than not, certain arcs and themes will be dropped because there is no time to cover everything.
'Aristotle and Dante' Tries to Tackle Too Much at Once It doesn’t take long to realize that Aristotle and Dante is juggling too much at once, especially after you realize that Ari and Dante’s personalities alone would be enough to have them trading banter for a whole movie — and maybe that would be a better solution, since in the space of 100 minutes the drama tries to tackle Ari’s relationship with his parents, Dante’s relationship with his parents, the HIV epidemic, homophobia,...
Aristotle and Dante also commits the grave mistake of repeating the “bury your gays” trope. A certain character is only outed after their death, and it’s a character that, at the very least, could have had meaningful conversations with Ari to hugely elevate the movie. Instead, the character’s sexuality is treated as a kind of plot twist, with their death used as a means to cause some emotion that justifies Ari’s transformation.
It’s also a problem for these conversations to take place when one character is offscreen for a good chunk of the movie. Regardless of whether it happens in the novel or not, it’s harder for a viewer to connect with a character when they are simply nowhere to be seen. There’s an attempt to balance this with letters getting read in voice-over narration, but the character to whom the letters are directed barely reacts to them, which makes us not care by extension.