(**1/2)
Something about William S. Burroughs’ books makes you feel like he’s taken you to a stinky bar, where your feet stick to the floor from the grime and everything smells. This adaptation of his book Queer doesn’t feel that way. It’s more like walking through a museum. A boring one.
Burroughs, a beat generation gay writer, wrote the short novel Queer as a follow up to his more involving and tortured 1953 autobiographical novel Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict. That book reflected his addiction to morphine and heroin. It ended with his hopes for tracking down a drug called yage, which is short for Ayahuasca. It’s a plant-based psychedelic, traditionally used by Indigenous cultures in South America and can alter a person’s thinking, sense of time and emotions. Hallucinations are one of its prime effects. Kinda like organic LSD.
Oscar-nominated filmmaker Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name), with a script by Justin Kuritzkes (Challengers), boldly but not appropriately adapts Burroughs book for the screen. He casts Daniel Craig as the main character William Lee, the author’s alter ego and pen name. A straight guy playing a gay role seems so yesterday. But that’s a different conversation. The story is set in Mexico City, in a section frequented by expatriates and college students. Lee is the resident lech at a local bar where gays congregate. Drunk and drugged out of his mind, he’s smitten with the looks of a young man named Eugene (Drew Starkey). And though his new heart throb is often in the company of a woman, Lee pursues him anyway.
Given Lee’s addictions, what’s on view should be a trip into the gutter that is raw and brutal. Yet Guadagnino has mistakenly decided to apply the same glossy tech ingredients that helped him shape Call Me by Your Name into an Oscar caliber film. It’s a mistake. His overly gorgeous rendition of a barrio and bar, looks like a layout for GQ (production designer Stefano Baisi; set decorator Lisa Scoppa). The clothes worn by nearly all are too dressy and neat (costume designer Jonathan Anderson (Challengers). E.g., Eugene’s shirts and pants in particular never have a spec of dirt, even though he wears the same thing every day. The lighting, except in sex or drug-taking scenes, seems showy (cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Call Me By Your Name). Too many scenes look like picture-perfect, wish-you-were-here postcards.
The proceedings finally find a style and rawness when the couple takes a trip to the Amazon and visits an American botanist turned priestess, Dr. Cotter (Lesley Manville). She turns the guys on to the yage Lee has sought. They get stoned as f—, wallow in their altered state and Lee finds the ultimate high he’s been looking for. An ecstasy that suits his weird behavior. As the men bond, finally audiences see something out of the ordinary, including an exotic venue and foreign culture. The more the boys get lost in the jungle wilderness, the trippier the film gets. And it needed to find this dimension.
Try as he may, Craig seems more like an actor trying than a person just being. He delivers his stilted lines like he’s in an off-Broadway play, not in real life. Starkey plays Allerton as illusive, and he gets that feel just right. Hard to recognize Manville, who looks like a homeless woman who hasn’t bathed since the last full moon. Jason Schwartzman plays Joe, a bar regular and he sticks out like a sore thumb. Drew Droege portrays Dumé, an older bar queen who sees all and tells all. He gives the most invisible performance.
If the readers who know Burroughs and his books are looking for a grungy writer, in a grungy atmosphere, they won’t find him or that in this delicate portrait. It’s like a glossy photo of Burroughs, when what you want is an old, tattered picture of him that’s stained with liquor, smells like drugs and possibly spent the night in bed with him and his one-night stand.
Queer feels like the homogenized, sanitized version of events. Some may wish it was rawer, like Andy Warhol’s Trash. Something that would make you feel grimy after you left the theater and not just bored.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teD48Kt6FMk
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Visit Film Critic Dwight Brown at DwightBrownInk.com.