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‘Queer’ Review: Daniel Craig Shows a Whole New Side in Luca Guadagnino’s Bold and Trippy Adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ Ahead-of-Its-Time Novel
It's an edgy tale of addiction and also a love story, as Craig plays William Burroughs with a winning vulnerability.
Daniel Craig, shifting about a dozen gears from James Bond, doesn’t make the mistake of impersonating the older William Burroughs who became a punk icon in the ’80s: the dry voice, the beady-eyed stare of hostility. Adapting Burroughs’ slender unfinished novel, which was written as a sequel to “Junkie” (1953) but not published until 1985 (it was Burroughs who kept it out of circulation, maybe because after defining his brand with “Naked Lunch” he was no longer willing to be seen as that vulnerable), Guadagnino, the brilliant director of “Challengers” and “Call Me by Your Name,” has a splendid time immersing us in the seamy corners of Mexico City, which in this movie recalls the sleepy ’50s border town of Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil.” He colors in a community: Lee and the other queers who hang out at the Ship Ahoy, a tastefully lit bar/restaurant, like Joe, a roly-poly nerd libertine (played by Jason Schwartzman, unrecognizable under ruddy padding, a bushy beard, and tortoise-shell glasses), or Dumé (Drew Droege), a vicious queen who also holds court at the Green Lantern, the district’s more seriously queer bar. Lee and Eugene traipse through the jungle and make their way to Dr. Cotter (played by an unrecognizable Lesley Manville, with greasy black hair and dirty teeth), an American botanist who’s been living there forever, amid the snakes and the foliage, doing “research.” She takes them in, and they cook up some Yage, which results in a hallucinatory sequence that’s pure high-wire loony-tunes filmmaking.
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