Rare is a year when moviegoers are graced with a double dose of work from a modern master. Luca Guadagnino has already made his mark on 2024 with the crowd-pleasing, surely Oscar-winning, “Challengers.” But within the time of that movie’s filming, and subsequent delayed release due to industry-wide labor demonstrations, Guadagnino, along with Daniel Craig, was able to gift us another treat for the Christmas season; a passion project that allowed him the chance to be weirder, more metaphysical and more metaphorical than any of his other recent work while telling a deeply personal story that scrapes so close to the bone you might feel it’s yearning vestiges for months after viewing.
This is “Queer.”
Based upon a 1985 novella by William S. Burroughs, a sequel to his 1953 novel “Junkie,” the film brings Burrough’s semi-autobiographical protagonist Lee (Daniel Craig) to Mexico City, where his days are whiled away drinking, injecting, writing, reading and engaging in intimate relations with any man who catches his eye. Burroughs’ narrative avatar Lee is an addict in a way that will ultimately lead to self-destruction on a long enough curve, but for now, is merely a symptom of a larger, more penetrating sickness. That illness is longing, the scintillating tingle of needing a most intimate emotional connection in a world where nobody really understands anybody on a cellular level. Lee opens the film by asking a man he hopes will reciprocate his affections: are you queer? The obtuse answer to that question haunts him throughout the film. The unknowability of looking across a crowded bar and being sure whether the man staring back at him shares his particular proclivity or not is what nurtures Lee’s passions, fuels his addictions, and ultimately sends him down a path of self-destruction and self-realization when he meets a freshly discharged U.S. Navy serviceman named Euguene Allerton.
An obsession forged across the frenetic chaos of a cockfight, Lee fixates on Allerton as an unknowable sphinx, a man who smiles at him cheekily but then spends his time with a woman more nights than not. This contradiction confounds Lee but compels him also. What he sees in Allerton is not simply sexual conquest, a warm body to share a bed for a night, but a warm soul to take solace in for a lifetime. A fellow traveler who might share his particular brand of queer and might compliment his very being, like lost puzzle pieces crafted by the gods to only fit each other. Guadagnino portrays this longing through the use of devastating crossfades of the men sitting side by side, with the spiritual yearning of Lee reaching over to caress Allerton’s face in a way his physical form is desperate to replicate. While the pair do ultimately become entangled, Allerton remains aloof, his inner mind a mystery to Lee. So, with the untamable devotion of both a lover and a junkie (tomayto/tomahto), Lee stumbles blindly into the South American rainforest, with Allerton by his side, in search of a legendary plant that might allow two people to “speak without opening their mouths”.
Craig is an actor reborn following his final turn as James Bond. Between his work with Rian Johnson (“Knives Out”, “Glass Onion”), Steven Soderbergh (“Logan Lucky”) and now Luca Guadagnino, the man has been proving himself as deft, nuanced, and passionate a performer as any working today. It almost makes one bemoan the years when Bond kept his attention. Alas, he submerges within the sweat-soaked world of Burroughs’ fantastical real life with an eagerness that matches Lee’s passions to an almost uncomfortable degree. Never before have we seen Craig so unmoored, so desperate for connection and unsure of how to find it. There is a fundamental truth that he finds in Lee: a universal feeling of floundering in a crowd where intimacy is a dead language that everyone but him can speak fluently. Watching Craig debase himself for the attention of Drew Starkey’s Allerton is painful because who amongst us has not been in his shoes, unsure how to adequately describe broiling passions without spontaneously combusting and destroying a gossamer thin connection that is barely beyond infancy? As Lee begins his descent into a literal and metaphysical heart of darkness, Craig’s performance belies a performer eager for intimate experience and expression. He carries the film’s soul within the bags beneath his eyes and the audience within the hole where his heart should be. One can only hope that Guadagnino collaborates with him again, and soon.
As the film’s third act erupts into drug-fueled psychedelia, Guadagnino burrows even deeper into Lee’s psyche, forcing us to confront the reality that perhaps knowing someone’s inner mind, even your own, might be more harmful than illuminating. There is a stickiness to the film that does not allow for clear answers or satisfying happily ever afters. On a long enough timeline, we all end up loving and losing. Longing is a perpetual state of being, and we’re all junkies in our own way, desperate to feel whole and seen, even while standing alone in a crowded room. All we can do is love while we can and leave the rest to the stars because all passions, even the most incendiary, eventually fade to memory and are ultimately lost in time.
So check out “Queer” for the kind of adult drama that we deserve so many more of: bold, colorful, complicated, and featuring a diamond cut score by Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Queer” is playing at The Broad Theater and Prytania Theatres at Canal Place.
