‘Queer’ Review: Daniel Craig Nails The Sardonic Spirit Of Writer William S. Burroughs In Luca Guadagnino’s Superb Literary Adaptation – Venice Film Festival

Damon Wise

September 4, 2024 at 1:50 AM·7 min read

The first and last written words of writer William S. Burroughs form the basis of this superb adaptation of Queer, a novel written in the early ’50s that, for myriad reasons, remained unpublished until 1985. At the time, its belated arrival coincided with a major resurgence of interest in Burroughs, the oldest and longest surviving member of the original Beat Generation writers, the others being Jack Kerouac (who never made it out of the ’60s) and Allen Ginsberg. By then, Burroughs had received long-overdue recognition as the godfather of the counterculture; heroin was his drug of choice, which assured his long-standing association with rock ’n’ roll, but his beatification by hard-drug fetishists often overshadowed the astonishing quality — not to mention foresight — of his writing.

Landing three years before Ted Morgan’s for-a-long-time-definitive biography Literary Outlaw (until Barry Miles’ Call Me Burroughs followed it 10 years ago), Queer was the Rosetta Stone that gave Burroughs’ admirers the insight they were looking for: While still writing in the hip but elegantly literary streetwise style that made him an idol to the likes of Lou Reed and Patti Smith, Queer expressed a so-far-unseen tenderness to his work, a deep-seated need that suddenly made everything about him make sense — not just his addiction but the entirety of his prolific output, in novels and shortform.

More from Deadline

Queer, the book and the film, concerns the run-up to and aftermath of the moment that haunted Burroughs for the rest of his life: In September 1951, in a drunken moment that can’t be explained by sheer recklessness, he attempted to shoot a whisky glass that his wife Joan had balanced on her head. “I guess it’s about time for our William Tell act,” he told the smattering of guests at a friend’s place in Mexico. He missed it and killed her, then — having slipped a hefty mordida to the police — moved back to the States for a short time.

In Luca Guadagnino’s incredibly insightful adaptation, Daniel Craig plays Bill Lee, the pseudonym Burroughs used to spare his wealthy family from the indignity of being related to the author of a lurid paperback called Junkie (1953). Lee both is Burroughs and yet not Burroughs, but the two overlap, notably in the expression of their sexuality. When we meet him, in Chapter One (“How Do You Like Mexico?”), Lee is cruising the city’s bars, lurking on the fringes of the expat scene. Lee’s gay radar is poor, and his predilection for straight guys over the readily available local rent boys almost always leads to rejection.

A chance glance at a young stranger, however, captivates him. Fresh out of the military, where he worked in intelligence, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) is an enigma to Lee; he seems straight as a die and yet he fraternises with the flamboyantly gay John Dumé (Drew Droege) at his local, the Ship Ahoy. Lee affects a platonic friendship but yearns to touch and kiss the young man, as we see when they go to a screening of Jean Cocteau’s surrealist 1950 fantasy Orpheus: the two men sit side by side, but Guadagnino literally superimposes Lee’s repressed desires onto the scene.

Finally, Lee bites the bullet and tells Allerton that he is “homosexual” and has only recently become reconciled to that fact. Given the censorious times, he admits he once equated homosexuality with the “painted, simpering female impersonators I’d seen in a Baltimore nightclub.” (Sidenote: Queer cements Burroughs’ somewhat unsung reputation as a pioneer in terms of creating for himself — like the similarly non-conformist French writer Jean Genet — a more assertive, unapologetically masculine gay identity.) One drunken night, Allerton gives into Lee’s advances, and though the sex they have is vigorous and consensual, Allerton starts to pull away from Lee’s affections.

While all this is going on, Lee has developed a fascination for a South American plant called yage (aka ayahuasca) that apparently gives users telepathic powers and has caused an intelligence war between the CIA and the Kremlin. So, in a desperate attempt to keep the younger man in his sights and by his side, he asks Allerton to accompany him on a journey into South America, to investigate the truth about yage, with no strings attached. “It won’t cost you a cent,” says Lee. “Perhaps not in money,” replies Allerton.

The quest for yage is a bit of a MacGuffin, since what Bill Lee ultimately is after is a way to merge himself entirely with another person (Burroughs’ writing is filled with references to mind control and bodyswapping; he even made a short film in 1972 called Bill and Tony, which was made to be projected over his face and that of British filmmaker Antony Balch). In that sense, sex is not enough; Lee wants to possess Allerton’s body, or even consume it, which is why the sex scenes in Queer are so violent, so urgent. And yet, every time it happens, Guadagnino takes the camera away from the action; the sad fact is that the ferocity of Lee’s lovemaking is pushing Allerton farther and farther away.

Quite aside from the terrific industrial-jazzy score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the soundtrack has a great deal to do with the success of Guadagnino’s film. Opening with Sinéad O’Connor’s eerily unadorned version of Nirvana’s “All Apologies” is a great start, and the ironic use of that band’s song “Come as You Are” is simply inspired (Burroughs almost always carried a gun, just as he lived out his last days on medicinal morphine that could have killed an elephant). Prince and New Order similarly figure on a soundtrack interspersed with more contemporary tunes from the likes of Benny Goodman and others.

The second half of the film — the light but deceptively important Chapter Two: “Travelling Companions” — sees Lee and Allerton encounter the crazy botanist Dr. Cotter (a fabulously deranged turn by a near-unrecognizable Lesley Manville). Ostensibly a bowl of leaf-and-twig soup, the yage she provides them opens up a psychic connection between the two men that will change them both irrevocably, Lee in particular. “[Yage] isn’t a portal to another place,” Lee has previously been warned. “It’s a mirror — and you may not like what you see.” Cocteau’s Orpheus comes careening back to mind.

The change it brings about in Lee is alluded to in a subtle, beautiful coda, which presents us with the older Bill Lee in a dream scene reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Craig looks the spit of WSB here, as Guadagnino shows us the dying man reflecting on his life. This is the Burroughs that finished his last novel, The Western Lands, in 1987, with the admission that “the old writer couldn’t write anymore because he had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words.” This is the Burroughs reflecting on the regrets of his life: Joan; their son, Billy; his British lover Ian Sommerville, who died in a car crash; his Moroccan lover Kiki, a victim of murder…

With this film, Guadagnino and Craig have succeeded where David Cronenberg failed, in humanizing a man whose preference for the company of cats was construed as misanthropy. Burroughs wanted to communicate without speaking, and with this highly intelligent film, Guadagnino has done that for him, translating into ravishing visuals the final words he entered into his journal before his death in August 1997, aged 83: “Love?” he wrote. “What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE.”

Title: Queer
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Distributor: A24
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Screenwriter: Justin Kuritzkes, from the novel Queer by William S. Burroughs
Cast: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Lesley Manville, Jason Schwartzman, Andra Ursuta, Michael Borremans, David Lowery
Running time: 2 hr 15 mins

Best of Deadline

News

Life

Entertainment

Finance

Sports

New on Yahoo

‘Queer’ Review: Daniel Craig Nails The Sardonic Spirit Of Writer William S. Burroughs In Luca Guadagnino’s Superb Literary Adaptation – Venice Film Festival