Queer
by Hope Madden
William S. Burroughs is a tough writer to set to film. Queer, an appendage to his first novel, Junky, published decades later as its own novella, is particularly thorny. Rather than submerging the writer’s themes and curiosities under layers of surreal flourish—as most of his novels did—both Junky and Queer mainly skim the surface in a Bukowski-esque autobiography by way of fiction. Mainly.
Protagonist William Lee—the Burroughs stand-in—is a recovering heroin addict in 1940s Mexico City, played with ferocious commitment by Daniel Craig. Without the buffer of the drug, Lee is a raw bundle of longing, isolation and desperation passing time among expats and looking for a different kind of fix.
Luca Guadagnino’s bittersweet period piece works best when it directs the confessional prose to create a character study. Craig meets that challenge, delivering a performance of unsheathed vulnerability and ache cut with salty wit and self-loathing.
Burroughs was the master of the unreliable narrator. Though Guadagnino doesn’t develop the same kind of reckless guide through his film, the script and performance make it clear that, though Lee is our protagonist, he’s not to be trusted. He’s a user, and though Craig’s performance is wonderfully human, he’s also every ounce the Ugly American.
That creates some fascinating scenes, but it does not make for much of a narrative arc.
Queer follows the relationship between Lee and the much younger WWII veteran Eugene Allerton, played with intriguing distance by Drew Starkey. Jason Schwartzman pops in and out for comic relief and the great Lesley Manville arrives in a third act that feels, while fascinating, also wildly out of place.
Because the relationship between Lee and Allerton is never really probed, and Allerton remains as distant and mysterious to us as he does to Lee, Queer feels unfinished. Guadagnino’s aesthetically lovely turns toward the surreal do little to either clarify the story or to deepen the mystery. They feel like ornamentation, which draws more attention to the artifice of the period detail, the stilted ensemble performances and the musical choices.
There is something in Queer that is beautiful, provocative, unsettling and unpleasant—all adjectives easily at home within the Burroughs atmosphere. It’s not a terrible way to spend an evening, but it’s not entirely satisfying, either.
