‘Queer’ Review: Luca Guadagnino’s Pitiable William S. Burroughs Adaptation

Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burrough’s second novel, Queer, begins, shall we say, peculiarly. Sinéad O’Connor’s haunting cover of Nirvana’s “All Apologies” scores overhead shots of what we soon realize is Burroughs’s own writing space, every object (a typewriter, drug paraphernalia, hastily scattered pages, an abundance of handguns) alluding with cringey literalness to the Beat Generation author’s thorny mythos.

“Everyone is gay,” per “All Apologies,” and it quickly becomes clear that Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes are content to stay on the surface of that knotty lyric and plenty more besides. They would seem to think that plumbing depths is for snootily cultured queens. Queer prefers to oafishly stick, and not always unentertainingly so, to mincing façades, beginning with Daniel Craig’s performance as Burroughs avatar William Lee.

His bruiser face tarted up with dorky specs and his growly voice tending ever so slightly toward a lisp, Craig sashays his way around a fever-dream vision of Mexico City created on the backlots of Rome’s Cinecittà Studios. There’s some charm to the balls-out artifice on display; even the driblets of sweat on people’s bodies are beguilingly overdone in a Querelle-lite sort of way. And Craig certainly gives his all to Guadagnino’s vision, channeling aspects of his fashionably bisexual Knives Out crime-solver Benoit Blanc, in addition to his pathetically degraded boytoy from the 1998 Francis Bacon faux-biopic Love Is the Devil, as he labors to convey Lee’s destructive infatuation with the opaque, icily handsome Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey).

Allerton is based on Burroughs’s actual acquaintance and object of obsession Adelbert Lewis Marker. Though when the novel was finally published in 1985 (it was written between 1951 and 1953), the author himself noted in his introduction that his doomed wife, Joan Vollner, was the spirit animating much of its themes and characters. Even this should be taken with a healthy grain of salt given the Beat tendency toward serpentine self-mythology. Guadagnino nonetheless adopts the Joan-as-tragic-muse legend as gospel, a not-indefensible choice as anyone who’s seen David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch can attest. Though the longer this distended 135-minute feature goes on, the more the paucity of the director’s perspective manifests itself.

Divided into three chapters and an epilogue, Queer is at its best in its table-setting early scenes. Guadagnino sketches in the American Lee’s abashed existence as an expatriate alongside his good friend Joe (a terrific Jason Schwartzman, channeling Allen Ginsberg) and a gaggle of catty homosexuals led by queen-about-town John Dumé, played with venomous gusto by Drew Droege (of Chloë Sevigny drag fame). Lee always seems to be covering up some guilty compulsion or overcompensating in his attempts at seduction. Easier to pay sex workers or shoot up heroin than to forge real human connection. Indeed, one of the most effective sequences here, captured in a single discomfiting shot, sees Lee prepare a syringe, inject himself, and then wait, with increasing desperation (and to the anachronistic, though poignant, accompaniment of New Order’s “Leave Me Alone”), for some kind—any kind—of relief.

Girl, we feel you. Yet it’s apparent from the jump that Allerton is no panacea. Lee and his idée fixe’s first encounters are one-sidedly electric, and their eventual hookup, though pleasurably horned-up and cum-swappingly graphic, flecked with disconnect. The chemistry is off, and that extends beyond the fictional realm. Craig and Starkey rarely click as performers. In their erotic encounters, especially, they seem like mere vessels for Guadagnino to adamantly respond to those who criticized him for the chasteness of Call Me By Your Name.

Lee and Eugene’s anti-magnetism is especially grating when they go on the road in search of a drug called yage (or ayahuasca), which Lee is convinced will open up telepathic doors of perception and connection. It’s here that Queer most deviates from Burroughs’s text, contriving a tonally bizarre climactic interlude involving a mad botanist, Dr. Cotter (a gamely over-the-top Lesley Manville). Her mute husband is played by Argentine director Lisandro Alonso, whose trippy, time- and genre-hopping epic Eureka shames the ambitions of this project.

There’s some wonky CGI (the yellow snake that greets Lee and Eugene at Dr. Cotter’s cabin looks and acts like a cousin of the ravenous reptile from Anaconda), as well as a dark-night-of-the-soul interpretive dance scene in which Lee and Allerton push their bodies beyond literal borders of skin and muscle. That latter overwrought spectacle is nowhere as affecting as a later, much less ostentatious moment in which Lee gazes at his aloof lover from afar, looks away for a second, and then turns back to find him gone—forever, as it turns out.

It’s a rare instance of psychologically precise devastation in a film that otherwise prizes the pitiable and the mawkish, and these exceedingly shallow qualities are taken to an extreme in Queer’s ludicrously surreal finale. The aesthetic becomes vaguely Lynchian—eerily empty rooms, unsettling sound design—as the strands of Lee’s life interweave with Burroughs’s own. But the emotions evoked are calamitously sentimental. Guadagnino effectively turns a very complicated literary figure into the kind of blubbering, nostalgic old man you’d expect to see in a student film or a Sundance prizewinner. The queer, tragically, becomes quotidian.