Queer

Luca Guadagnino is a hard director to pin down. I've seen seven of the nine features he's made, and to my eye, they range from the sublime (A Bigger Splash) to the ridiculous (Bones and All), with a lot of interesting zigs and zags in between. But nothing he's made yet feels as much of an across-the-board misfire of poor and lazy choices as this stunningly tedious adaptation of William S. Burroughs's autobiographical 1953 novella Queer. The book, which was published 32 years after it was written due to its explicit homosexual content, is an account of Burroughs' fictional surrogate, William Lee, living in Mexico City after leaving America due to the fact that his heroin addiction made him a criminal. He's in Mexico ostensibly to dry out, though Lee's version of drying out is remaining inebriated day and night and distracting himself with the constant pursuit of young men for sex. He becomes fixated on a specific guy named Eugene Allerton, a discharged American Navy man who is younger, more attractive, and infinitely less desperate than him. With the lure of money and an adventure, Lee convinces Allerton to head to Ecuador with him in search of a mysterious plant that supposedly possesses telekinetic powers.

Queer has all the trappings of an auteur director's long-gestating passion project, but it plays more like the kind of quicky production a busy filmmaker squeezes in between making two more "important" pictures. The screenplay adaptation comes courtesy of Justin Kuritzkes, whose only other feature credit is Guadagnino's other 2024 film, Challengers. Though shot on 35mm in what I assume are actual Mexican locations, the movie feels like it was filmed on a hoaky standing western studio like Old Tuson. It's not that everything appears to be faked in front of greenscreens, like this year's other queer-themed Mexican-set misfire, Amilia Perez, but it lacks a grounded sense of verisimilitude in terms of both setting and time period. Part of the issue is Guadagnino's use of anachronistic needle-drops. This technique is always a tricky choice that some filmmakers—Robert Altman in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Quentin Tarantino in Inglourious Basterds, Sofia Coppola in Marie Antoinette—have pulled off well. But this film takes the Baz Luhrmann approach to this aesthetic, where the song isn't so much a commentary or counterpart to what the film is showing us; it's the whole show. Each music choice here, aside from the generic score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (never thought I'd type that phrase), is so on the nose we don't need the accompanying visuals to know what's meant to be conveyed with each track.

The movie Queer most reminded me of is John Huston's late-career adaptation of Malcolm Lowrys Under the Volcano, an even more "unfilmable novel" than Queer. But, unlike this movie, we really feel like we are in Mexico while watching Huston's Under the Volcano. And the drunken character wearing a white suit in need of laundering who shuffles through the sunbaked streets of that film is played by Albert Finney in a sensational, transformative performance that connects with almost every feeling the book and film try to convey. In Queer, William Lee is played inexplicably by Daniel Craig, who is not only far too attractive for this role, but his outfit, mannerisms, and American accent are too reminiscent of his hilariously caricatured turn as Benoit Blanc in the Knives Out movies. Craig has the slim, compact, muscular physique of a movie star who sculpts his body, not the gaunt, wan, shriveled physique of a junkie who abuses his. It's not that Craig's performance is terrible, it's just not credible, and since Queer is essentially a character study about a rather pathetic and insecure man, it is a fatal flaw to cast a movie star who can't shed either of the robust scene roles audiences most associate him with.

The movie does feature an amusing supporting turn by Jason Schwartzman as a hilariously overweight, bearded buddy of Lee's who also has a taste for young men but doesn't have the money to take them to hotel rooms, so he is constantly getting ripped off. As Allerton, Drew Starkey has a great look and conveys the character's blend of amusement and disgust with Lee well, but there's no way to make this character interesting because part of the point is that Lee is obsessed with this guy's physicality, not his indifferent soul. When Mike Leigh regular Lesley Manville arrives in the third act, it should provide a much-needed boost of energy, but her manic one-note performance only makes the film's bloated conclusion feel interminable. Guadagnino and Kuritzkes tack on some details from more iconic chapters in Burroughs's life, but this does little to enliven a film that does such a poor job of telling what is already a deliberately frustrating and even off-putting story.