Queer is a pretentious, if visually appealing, slog

Queer, the latest from director Luca Guadagnino and his Challengers scribe Justin Kuritzkes, is a rambling disappointment.

The film is based on a short novel of the same name by Beat writer William S. Burroughs (though it also appears to borrow heavily from some of his letters and the events of his own life). William Lee (Daniel Craig), a one-time pen name for Burroughs, is a layabout junkie, spending his days living in post-war Mexico City finding lovers and getting high. When he makes eye contact with a striking young man, Gene Allerton (Drew Starkey), on the street one night, he becomes hopelessly infatuated. 

Lee is self-professedly queer (despite Burroughs' own vehement denial of such), and in pondering whether Gene shares his proclivities, he sets out to seduce him. The two share a dance of desire and repulsion for nearly three hours as Lee wrestles with drug addiction and heroin withdrawal, and eventually brings Gene along on a wild goose chase through South America to seek out yagé, more commonly known as ayahuasca. Lee is intrigued by the drug’s psychedelic properties and reported ability to make its users telepathic. Overwhelmed by his hopeless desire for Gene, he seeks to use the drug to communicate the feelings he is unable to speak aloud.

Craig trades in his chicken-fried Benoit Blanc accent for a more genteel Southern drawl, lending Lee a meek, awkward, insecure bearing. It’s a real departure from many of his colder roles, on stage as Macbeth, in films such as Road to Perdition, and of course, as James Bond.

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Starkey is a lovely counterpoint to Craig’s tanned and sozzled form. He’s full of youthful vigor and an intriguing reserve (even if the glasses he wears do make him the spitting image of Milo in Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire). Though he sleeps with Lee, it’s never quite clear if Gene is also queer. He holds back any decisive answer (perhaps because he is unwilling to confront it himself), and Starkey delivers a performance of marvelous restraint.

Jason Schwartzman also deserves notice for his comic relief as fellow ex-pat Joe, who brings this idiosyncratic outcast to lovable life. The running joke of his lovers stealing his things is the movie’s most enjoyable facet.

Guadagnino loves to paint provocative and lyrical pictures as a director, and there’s certainly no shortage of those with lush backdrops and portraits of nightlife out the windows of bars and hotel rooms. Each shot here is meticulously composed, more like a painting than a frame of film, but it’s all very pretty with no soul. The images are hollow, amounting only to beautiful pictures and nothing more.

His most interesting shots echo the surrealist movement of the 1920s, resembling figures in Man Ray paintings and scenes from the films of Luis Buñuel. A naked woman with no legs floats, disembodied in space. A scene later, Lee sees the clay blocks of her feet in the street. Guadagnino leans into the metaphysical here, echoing themes in Burroughs’ work. While visually arresting, it’s never clear what the purpose of these scenes are. The entire project seems more a realization of Guadagnino’s artistic pretensions than anything else.

If you know Burroughs’ work and life, there are some Easter eggs here (most notably in the recreation of the “William Tell” act that led to the murder of the writer’s first wife). But who is Lee, besides a junkie and a man entrenched in wanting? He is helpless when it comes to Gene, even if he is also capricious and cruel. But to what end? For all of Lee’s grasping and his addictions (not merely to drugs, but to sex and desire), there is no compelling commentary on identity and sexuality to be found.

Instead, Queer is inscrutable, often seemingly deliberately so. Guadagnino seems to want to frustrate his audience, to make them endure an interminable restlessness shared by the characters. The entire film reeks of self-importance and a need to remind us all that those behind the camera are smarter than anyone in the audience.

Queer is an exercise in cinematic smugness. It’s a shame because it does contain some truly fine performances and compelling imagery. But much like its central character, it can’t get over itself. Grade: C