"Queer"

 ☆☆ 

Queer is Luca Guadagnino's second film this year, and it almost everything that made his first 2024 film, Challengers, thrilling, exciting and compelling. More crucially, it lacks the urgency and vibrancy of Guadagnino's earlier Call Me By Your Name, which is curious for many reasons — not the least of which is that Queer is about a gay junkie but doesn't seem able to come up with anything interesting to say about being gay or being a junkie.

Everything in Queer has been done before and been done better. That's something Guadagnino seems to understand, because Queer cribs from a long history of better movies. There are the stylized settings and saturated hues of Querelle and One from the Heart. There are the wild-eyed moments of lust and horror from Reflections in a Golden Eye and Suddenly, Last Summer. There is the languid, lurid, boozy lecherousness of Death in Venice and Touch of Evil. There is the main credit sequence lifted from Call Me By Your Name.

What, then, is Queer trying to do, except maybe liberate Daniel Craig from the legacy of James Bond in a way none of his acting predecessors ever tried to do with as much definitiveness. This is the second gay character Craig has played, after detective Benoit Blanc, and we get it: He is not defined by his macho screen persona. Fair. But we're not five minutes into Queer when Craig is (as discreetly as this can be done) pretending at gay oral sex.

The rest of the time, he's a walking stereotype of desperate, middle-aged gay swishiness. The film's rambling screenplay makes sure he says the word "queer"—in self-mocking reference, as an adjective, as a noun, as an epithet, as a pejorative—as often and as campily as possible.

There isn't a moment of actual recognizable humanity on display anywhere in Queer, which takes its time—oh, does it take its time—finding a story within the descriptive novella by William S. Burroughs. This is a meandering, plodding affair, enlivened by the eye candy provided by Drew Starkey, his well-built and often unclothed body, and his affected Southern drawl.

Craig's character, an itinerant loner living in Mexico named William Lee, becomes obsessed with Starkey's Eugene Allerton. Why? No real reason, other than the boy looks good (and he does look good, Guadagnino makes sure everyone in the audience, no matter their sexual orientation, thinks so). They sweat, they have sex, they do it all over again, and eventually—after a long, long while—we learn that Lee is an addict, and that he wants to go further south to find a legendary hallucinogen. He takes Eugene with him. They have more sex. They sweat some more. Lee has withdrawals. They go to the jungle. They meet an American hermit (Lesley Manville, proving that even the best actors are not capable of breathing life into ridiculous characters). They take the drug. They get really, really high.

Then there's some more weirdness. The movie takes on some of Burroughs' phantasmagoric imagery, but ... why? How did a movie called Queer end up stoned in the jungle?

Then it ends.

Critics seem divided. Audiences less so. I talked with the nonplussed couple next to me, self-professed "Luca" fans. This didn't do it for them. Will Queer do it for anyone? Time will tell. At the very least, you won't only see Daniel Craig as James Bond from this point on; you'll also see him as a straight actor who will go gay for pay.

Queer doesn't just star a prominent heterosexual, it's written by one, too: Justin Kuritzkes, who also wrote Challengers, a movie that teased at its gay themes. Queer isn't meant to be a tease. It shouldn't be a tease. And I suppose—I'll concur with a heavy sigh—that it shouldn't matter whether an actor or a screenwriter is gay. They're getting at a human experience, right?

In Queer, they're supposed to be getting at a queer experience, but it doesn't work. The movie seems clueless about its central theme. It's strange to see Guadagnino flail so badly with this material, despite his visual flair. It leaves me wondering if the reason Call Me By Your Name succeeded so fully is that it was written by James Ivory, a gay man who understood the central emotional conundrum inherent in that film. A perspective like his is what's so desperately, glaringly missing from Queer. 

Viewed December 13, 2024 — AMC Universal

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