I gotta say, too, I read a couple of interviews in which Aitch Alberto says she wanted to make a different kind of story about queer Latinidad – one that veered away from violence – and I am pretty baffled. Aristotle and Dante is quite a violent movie, maybe even too violent to have deserved this PG13 rating it has. It's certainly a shocking level of violence for a movie with the kind of Disney-channel vibes that this one has. Not only is a terrible act of transphobic violence described to us in act two, but in act three we actually watch one of the main characters commit terrible violence as revenge for a horrific violent beating experienced by one of the other characters.
But really the problem here is the script. It's plotted weirdly, so that we are ahead of the main character for the entirety of the film; we know exactly what he's gonna do and what he's probably feeling. Oh, and big surprise, so do all the adults in the movie. Aristotle and Dante is the kind of terrible film about teenagers where the adults know everything and the teenagers' instincts are all wrong and they have so very much to learn from the adults in their lives if only they would open up and talk to them. It's offensive and paternalistic to make a movie about teenagers where they have no insights into the world and where we don't actually get their perspective but instead take the perspective of people who know so much more than they do. Nor is this film saved by the dialogue, which clunks along making false notes throughout.
This was a real missed opportunity. I spent the entirety of this movie wishing I liked it. Obviously I want to love a gay coming-of-age movie about teenage boys, but Aristotle and Dante is just not it.
