We the Animals

I am disappointed to report that Jeremiah Zagar's film adaptation of We the Animals is not good.

There are going to be some spoilers below, so if you haven't read the novel and don't want it spoiled, you better stop now and go get the book. It's great!

It was always going to be a little strange to adapt Justin Torres' coming-of-age novel to the screen. The form of Torres' book is a set of somewhat disconnected short stories – each section describing different moments in the childhood and adolescence of three brothers and their fluctuating relationships with their mother and father.

But Zagar opts for an approach that actually avoids the coming of age that is central to the Bildungsroman in the first place. Instead of Jonah, the narrator, starting off at age 6, as he does in the novel, he starts off at age 9. He turns 10 in the movie, but the little guy doesn't get any older than that. Jonah is played, for the entirety of the film by nine-year-old Evan Rosado in his first film role.

The trouble with this is that the story of We the Animals hinges on a sexual coming of age. In the novel, Jonah and his brothers are inseparable, basically one person. They do everything together. But Jonah grows apart in some ways – against his own will. And he becomes sexually attracted to men. When his family finds out, they kick him out of the house. This section of the book is painful, but it follows immediately after Jonah's first sexual experience, and so the family's rejection in Torres' novel feels... well, less important. Jonah has already found something else, something maybe even more important and better. The scene in the novel in which he first has sex with a man is extraordinary. It's beautifully written and is easily my favorite section in the book. He has sex with a stranger, but he feels baptized, turned inside out and made into a man. It's a gorgeous sequence.

Raúl Castillo and Evan Rosado

This is simply not possible with a nine-year-old actor. For the film to work the way the book works, we would need at least two actors for each of the boys. We would have to watch them grow up in the movie. Zagar opts out of this for reasons I don't really understand, and the result of this is that the movie's plot becomes totally nonsensical. Little Jonah is just a ten-year-old. He doesn't have sex with a stranger. He doesn't come of age. He doesn't become anything. He's ten. He doesn't do anything, really, to which anyone might object except to draw some pictures. His brothers are too young really to reject him, and there's no reason his parents wouldn't dismiss his behaviors as the behaviors of a child. Still, in Zagar's movie they do reject him, even though the film can't really explain why they would, and then Jonah, I guess, runs away from home again. It doesn't make sense and it doesn't work.

I recognize that I am being hard on this film, and I know that films aren't the same things as books, but I actually am just not sure why Zagar decided to make this story at all. It feels to me like he simply didn't understand the book... or at least didn't understand the book's treatment of sexuality. Having this adorable nine-year-old at the center just makes the whole thing so strange – and so nonsexual. And in a fashion that seems typical of mainstream LGBT politics, what is sex in Torres' novel becomes love in Zagar's film. We the Animals understands gay sexuality as a kind of essence, something that gay people are. For me this is a basically anti-queer aesthetic, a straight-people way of interpreting queer sexuality. And it's a way of not confronting something central to most people's fears about queer sexuality; see, once a film like this has decided that gay people are a "kind of people", then it no longer has to think about the sex that gay people have. So instead of the sexual baptism by a strange bus driver at a truck stop that Torres wrote, we get, in Zagar's film, a little boy who stares longingly at an older boy and works up the courage to give him a kiss. It's sweet, to be sure, but it's a poor adaptation of a beautifully rejuvenative original.