Film review #2: Queer

Wills praises Craig vehicle

Divergent – and intriguing – views of Luca Guadagnino’s recently-unwrapped screen adaptation of Burroughs’ novella Queer as a pair of critical voices engage. First, DAVID S. WILLS, Beatdom editor and counterculture essayist, casts a largely approving eye over a production which stars Daniel Craig, then indie musician and former Morning Star arts columnist C.J. THORPE-TRACEY delivers some lingering doubts regarding the latest cinematic realisation of a Beat text…

Queer, dir. Luca Guadagnino (2024)

By David S. Wills

Queer, the recent and long-awaited adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ novel of the same name, opens on images of centipedes, books, a typewriter, jungle gear, poultry shears, and guns. In short, these are artifacts familiar to those who know Burroughs’ life and work.

It feels like a lazy trope, another predictable start to a dull Beat movie… but there’s something off about it. Over these images we have an odd cover of a Nirvana song. It doesn’t quite fit. It is more offbeat than Beat, and that’s because this will not be your typical Beat movie. This is a different take altogether.

From our first meeting with Daniel Craig’s William Lee, it is even more obvious that the makers of this film do not want to add to the pile of drivel that represents Hollywood’s efforts at putting the Beats on film to date.

Most notably we have a very different take on Burroughs. Okay, I suppose it’s William Lee rather than William Burroughs that Craig portrays but even so, there is none of the public persona we have come to associate with El Hombre Invisible. When you look back at earlier Beat films, there have been admirable attempts at capturing Burroughs even in the most dismal of films, but at the same time these are imitations of a face Burroughs presented to the world. They capture the myth rather than the real man.

Viggo Mortenson and Kiefer Sutherland, for example, captured his voice and the mannerisms very well. Others have gone for the cold, patrician, outlaw-intellectual, slightly unnerving version of Burroughs that is probably best known. Daniel Craig, however, has gone for a very different side of him: goofy, vulnerable, sloppy, desperate, awkward, and inquisitive.

Yes, he has a fedora and a pistol on his belt, but one would not immediately think, ‘This is William S. Burroughs’ after glancing up at the screen for a moment, and, honestly that’s a major positive in this adaptation. Craig’s Burroughs is human whilst earlier attempts were frankly two-dimensional.

It is not only Burroughs/Lee that this film treats differently. My main complaint about earlier Beat movies is the extent to which the filmmakers beat you over the head with forties/fifties symbols. You are bombarded with generic jazz music and hit with the conformity cliché whilst forced to see the giddy antics of our Beat heroes as the very opposite of this stale world.

Queer does it differently. The soundtrack is bizarre but somehow it works. It mixes songs from different decades and in totally different styles and these are often wildly incongruous with the scenes over which they play. The backdrops are cheap but pleasant, always hazy and dreamy, with the filmmakers relying heavily on miniatures.

It is half set in Mexico and half in South America, so we do not have the usual Times Square scenes or New York dive bars. Instead, we have interesting shots of street life in early 1950s Mexico City. The secondary characters are well drawn rather than functioning as cardboard-cut-out-like scenery.

The dialogue is natural rather than filled with crude efforts to highlight the hip intelligence of the protagonists. There is no embarrassing hepcat talk, no forced references to French poetry, no needless exposition.

The story is handled well. It is a love story, of course, but an unconventional one. Lee is the hero yet he is pathetic and predatory. The film shows him in a sympathetic light but does not flinch from his creepy, possessive side. In fact, it rather embraces it.

The relationship between Lee and Allerton (Drew Starkey) is depicted as complex and believable and the sex scenes, whilst quite explicit, are not pointlessly gratuitous. The film captures the messiness of love with its dark side only barely concealed by its beauty. This is about as far from predictable as it gets.

It’s been a few years since I last read Queer and I deliberately chose not to re-read it before watching this for fear that it might somehow ruin the movie for me. However, many parts felt surprisingly familiar and when I went back to compare them with the book, I found that it was indeed quite faithful to the text.

This shouldn’t be important, honestly, because a movie should be an adaptation rather than a faithful representation of the original work, but it was nice to see chunks of dialogue used unmodified, such as when Joe Guidry (played wonderfully by Jason Schwartzman) is robbed by a prostitute.

The text here is almost the same, down to Lee’s witty replies. There are good reasons why filmmakers take artistic liberties but sometimes Burroughs’ dialogue seems almost written for the screen. This is one such example.

Another is the following long speech that is delivered beautifully by Craig, which as a monologue is perhaps less appealing to a director, yet Luca Guadagnino has included the following with only a few tiny changes:

‘A curse,’ said Lee. ‘Been in our family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands – the lymph glands that is, of course – when the baneful word seared my reeling brain: homosexual. I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted, simpering female impersonators I had seen in a Baltimore night club. Could it be possible that I was one of those subhuman things? I walked the streets in a daze, like a man with a light concussion – just a minute, Doctor Kildare, this isn’t your script. I might well have destroyed myself, ending an existence which seemed to offer nothing but grotesque misery and humiliation. Nobler, I thought, to die a man than live on, a sex monster. It was a wise old queen – Bobo, we called her – who taught me that I had a duty to live and to bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love.’

Craig deliveries this wonderfully and then goes off into a routine, one of several in the film.

The second half of the film moves from realism into a trippier, more dream-like depiction of Lee and Allerton’s time in South America, where they are searching for yagé (and Lee for other substances, including opiates). There are intense dream sequences; a vision of a legless, naked Joan Vollmer replete with a needle in her arm; and a disturbing yagé trip more in keeping with Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch than the rest of Queer. Prepare yourself for a visual representation of ‘schlupping’.

Indeed, this film succeeds in part because it does not shy from vacillating between realism and surrealism; between humour and horror and romance. It defies genre and spurns stereotypes. I’ve already mentioned the musical choices, which are jarring at times, and often seem deliberately set against the scene they depict, such as a romantic song playing over Lee’s indecent proposal to Allerton. The effect is engaging but disorienting, like much of the film and like Burroughs’ novels.

The film does well to capture the junk element that is so important when considering this author. We have a very, very long and totally non-stylised shot of Lee cooking and shooting and then enjoying the hit. Again, this is achieved without clichés and Hollywood drama. Drugs are neither glamourised nor demonised.

Then there are many scenes of him junksick and scamming pharmacists and doctors. We see the ugliness and also hear his perspective on addiction as a sickness and junkies as the persecuted. The yagé factor is interesting if perhaps a little overdone, but it makes for a nice chapter within the larger story. It is here that the film takes liberties, with Doctor Cotter’s character (Lesley Manville) becoming female and bearing no resemblance to the admittedly thinly portrayed Cotter of the novel.

I know I said I didn’t want to compare film and book, but this was an obvious change and one worth noting. Cotter was more or less a plot device in the book but in the film she is an amusing madwoman whose gun-toting insanity makes Lee look rather tame by comparison.

As for the ending… Well, I will say nothing of the film’s final 20 minutes for even though it is hard to spoil a well-known story, I thought the interpretation was… interesting. I’ll let the reader watch and figure it out.

I’ve mostly been positive about this film but it is of course imperfect and I could list a number of things that didn’t work. There is an utterly idiotic snake scene, for example, and sometimes one cannot tell whether transitional scenes were made to look deliberately crude or whether this was due to budgetary constraints, but these do not detract from the film’s merits.

In fact, even in some of the apparent problems I must admit that I admired the audacity of the director. It made me wonder what Burroughs himself would’ve made of it. I think he would’ve been uncomfortable with how vulnerable and pathetic the Burroughs/Lee character seems (which, as I’ve said, was for me a strong point) but I suspect he would’ve admired the creativity that went into it. It is a brave and daring film and certainly ranks among the very best in Beat adaptations.

See also: ‘Film review #3: Queer’, January 24th, 2025; ‘Queer thinking: Harris’ movie takes’, January 16th, 2025

Editor’s note: You can read more of David S. Wills’ work at Beatdom Updates beatdom.substack.com