Queer
Daniel Craig's talents are wasted in a hapless Burroughs adaptation.
Queer (2024). Grade: D
I’d been kinda curious about Italian director Luca Guadagnino; several of his movies (Call Me by Your Name, Challengers) have received rave reviews. Unfortunately, Call Me is about young love between the gorgeous — yawn — and Challengers about young love + tennis, so 40-Yawn. But I do (or once, did) like the writings of William S. Burroughs a good deal, and I enjoy Daniel Craig a lot, so I thought I’d give this a try.
Well? This Guadagnino movie reminds me of the ones Yorgos Lanthimos makes; if you’re impressed by those, you would probably be impressed by this.
I loathed it inside of five minutes and the aching hate only grew stronger as this nothingburger went on. It had a kind of compelling boredom and shallowness that numbed me into not mustering the energy to turn it off. Instead, when one character called another “cold-blooded,” I went Wiki-diving on cold-blooded animals. There’s all kinds of different sorts! There’s ectothermy, which is a word I kinda knew (not accurately); there’s also poikilothermy, and Bradymetabolism, which deflates footballs.
It’s actually unfair to Lanthimos to compare this film to his, although there’s strong similarities in terms of approach. Both strive to be “visually striking” in the way awful music videos and fashion-magazine ads are; both like to think they're pushing buttons about how sexuality is presented on film (which bored me stupid, and I’ve enjoyed a movie called Bad Luck Banging with actual non-simulated sex in it).
I turned off Lanthimos’s The Favourite after about 40 minutes, and it’s awfully hard to get me to turn off anything with Rachel Weisz AND Olivia Colman it it; the movie just seemed far more about the director’s preening than those fine actors’ talents. I did, grudgingly, make it all the way through Poor Things, which was mostly a tasteless wreck — but I enjoyed Willem Dafoe. Emma Stone had a lot of creative control in that one, and while I didn’t agree with every choice she made, I respected the performance. She had a wobbly walk that was great physical comedy; it would make Elsa Lanchester proud.
So while Lanthimos is just as pretentious as this Guadagnino trash is, at times he’ll actually let the actors shine. Guadagnino’s got Daniel Craig here in what looks to be a pretty clever performance — and Guadagnino just dumps all over it. He’s got bigger things to SAY than “let’s watch this good actor be good.” (What he’s saying is “I’m a mesmerizing film genius, everyone be impressed.”)
Craig is one of those actors, like George Clooney, who’s a big star, is impossibly handsome, and is perfectly willing to look ridiculous. When he pointed gape-mouthed at a Komodo dragon in Skyfall, I laughed my head off; and I loved his goofy Southern accent in the Knives Out movies. (It was kinda like a parody of Southern accents, but not a mean one; the whole idea is that it makes the bad guys underestimate the detective’s intelligence. It’s like Peter Falk’s rumpled Columbo coat.) I’ve enjoyed him in serious roles, too — there’s a talky BBC one called Copenhagen that he’s excellent in. Craig’s played Iago on stage, and that sounds like it would be REALLY good.
Here, it sounds like he’s pulling off an impression of what Wiiliam Burroughs would have sounded like before he became, you know, “William Burroughs.” Anybody of a certain age is going to be familiar with the grumbling, droning Burroughs voice (sample with one cussword here). It’s the voice of a perpetual preacher/scold. Burroughs became something of a pop culture icon in the late 80s/early 90s; he was popping up everywhere in things from TV ads to music videos. He collaborated with Tom Waits, Laurie Anderson, Kurt Cobain (this film uses two Nirvana songs and I wanted to beg the screen “leave poor Kurt outta this”).
So Craig’s doing the Burroughs voice as a character who WILL be that Burroughs in his 70s/80s, but isn’t there yet. It’s a good idea, and his look is intriguing; he’s half-gone to seed from booze & drug abuse. (When the sex scenes show up, we see that Craig’s lost a little of his James Bond super-fitness, although I’m sure he got it back soon enough after those scenes were finished.)
But Guadagnino keeps obscuring Craig’s performance with stupid visual trickery, like having him start to become translucent when his character’s in a donwnbeat moment. How incredibly foolish. Let Craig show it; let the actor act. I wanted to hear that voice more, not watch Guadagnino try to impose whatever incredibly shallow “vision” he has on this material.
I read a lot of Burroughs, 30 years ago or so. Pretty much everything except the most experimental, “cut-up” novels. (Where Burroughs would cut out individually-typed words and randomize them, using the combinations which formed accidentally yet made grammatical sense. Not all, just the ones he thought best. Burroughs believed this was a way of tapping into some mystic cosmic energy. I believe it would be very time-consuming to do, so I respect the work, yet any cosmic messaging was lost on me.)
I don’t remember Queer very much; if I recall, it felt like a less-interesting sequel to Junkie, a sort of down-and-dirty semi-autobiographical work about life as a heroin addict. Burroughs seemed to have felt the same way; Queer was never finished (although the unfinished version was published in 1985).
One of the things that stands out about Junkie is how straightforward it is, without any moralizing or fake poetic passages. The same thing goes for much of Naked Lunch, too, despite that later book’s bizarre fantastical content. It’s also a funny book; some of the most out-there extreme sex and violence and grotesqueries are also very over-the-top silly. Like the steam-powered dildo with the name “Steeely Dan III from Yokohama.” (Yes, it’s where the band name came from.)
So it’s strange that Queer, the movie, is full of fake poetic visual passages, and deeply unfunny. We do see Craig (as “William Lee,” the pseudonym Burroughs used for Junkie), going off on comic tangents like the world’s most disgusting food ideas, but it’s only there to show us how LONELY he is inside. It has none of Burroughs’s self-aware sarcasm. This script (a far too thin outline by Justin Kuritzes) and this director don’t bother imagining how to give their fictional Burroughs the same bite the real one had.
Aside from Craig’s under-utilized performance, most of the rest of the cast doesn’t even register. Drew Droege and David Lowery have some short, OK moments as goofy characters in Burroughs’s circle. Jason Schwartzman is here as a sort of Allen Ginsberg impersonator, playing (as always) the self-admiring Jason Schwartzman. Ronia Ava looks very striking and has basically no lines.
All the boy-toy lust objects that the boozy, hazy Craig drools over are vapidly pretty faces, devoid of personality. I don’t know if that’s because they can’t act, or Guadagnino can’t direct; two things can be true at once. Lesley Manville plays a rather wild-eyed, wild-haired deep-in-the-jungle Mad Scientist Earth Mother. I’ve only seen her in one other movie, Mike Leigh’s Another Year, which really belonged in the special Blue Jasmine honor brigade of “when movie directors show utter contempt for their social inferiors.”
This is such a rotten, small-minded approach to doing a Burroughs adaptation, it’s enough to make you wonder if Burroughs was ever really all so good as all that. What a horrible achievement that is, a book adaptation which makes you like the original less. What a s**t thing to do. You've poisoned a thing I liked; great job, Guadagnino.
As always with vastly over-worshiped movies of this sort, I find myself puzzled how something so truly awful could be loved by so many critics at once. (Critical consensus now is practically a way of guaranteeing a movie will be soulless pretentious junk.) If I were feeling nastier, I might say that adulating pretentious junk was a way for critics to show their cultural superiority to the great unwashed; there’s probably something to that. It’s CERTAINLY something their readers want to feel. Liking certain movies, these days, is like having certain books on your bookshelf (say, Malcolm Gladwell). It means you went to the RIGHT colleges.
If I’m feeling less nasty (I haven’t decided yet), it could just be that most modern critics are much younger than myself, and younger people are often easier to impress with art that attempts to “say something” deep/thoughtful. Not because young people are foolish in any way, but because they’re less cynical. Once you’ve been around long enough, you’ll be highly skeptical of anyone in the “entertainment industry” who is claiming to make art straight from the goodness of their heart. Movies are about ego, status, and greed, for the most part, and most of the praised directors are blowhards. Nothing about that’s changed in the last 125+ years.
This movie might have some resonance for some who identify with the struggles of “queer” people, in which case, God bless ya if you find something to enjoy in this one. I do feel like Craig’s performance is from a well-meaning place. A better movie about being older, gay, and lonely is A Single Man, with Colin Firth. It’s by no means any kind of cinematic masterpiece, but that film’s director (fashion designer Tom Ford) does what Guadagino’s too conceited to do here; he just lets Firth act. Sometimes a less-experienced director who simply lets the skilled actors and production team do their thing is more effective than a more-acclaimed director with a nonexistent “vision.”
Over a decade before this was made, Steve Buscemi was announced as the director, with a script by Oren Moverman, who wrote the solid The Messenger. I think that would have been a better film; Buscemi strikes me as a thoughtful, unpretentious guy — that’s what this material needed.
A true who’s who list of pretentious directors expressed their admiration of this film… and John Waters, who is wonderful. But he put it in a typical unpretentious Waters way: “‘Daniel Craig may be queerbait for taking on the gay beatnik role of William Burroughs’s alter ego, but I’m all for it. He’s absolutely brilliant and even has a “snowball” scene, a happy reminder of a sex act I had long forgotten. Oh, if today’s homos were this radical, I’d be a much happier queer myself.’”