Daniel Craig is on a campaign to build a post James Bond career. He’s already appeared in a couple of Broadway plays. He’s become the star of the “Knives Out” franchise.
Now Craig takes on his most daring role with Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” based on the novel by famed Beat writer William S. Burroughs. Last night “Queer” got its star studded premiere at the New York Film Festival, where Craig was so applauded an Oscar nomination is not out of the question. The audience included Steve Buscemi — who once wanted to make this movie himself — and Natasha Lyonne.
The packed audience at the Alice Tully Hall premiere twent wild as the creative team took the stage for the post-screening Q&A. And it is not only because the movie stars Craig. Guadagnino explained how as a boy in Palermo, he picked up the Burroughs work and always wanted to make this film. While working on “Challengers” from screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes’ script, he gifted him the book one day and said “Read this tonight.”
The text of “Queer” — unlike say, Burroughs’ most famous book, “Naked Lunch,” — has a linear thread so a narrative could be made of the love story between Craig’s William Lee and a younger Eugene Allerton (a formidable Drew Starkey). Yes, there’s plenty of man-on-man sex –minus the testosterone. How else can you explain the tenderness? Prowling Mexico City looking for a connection, Lee has a tryst or two, essential to the vision of what homosexuality meant in the mid-century—achy, twitchy, awkward, and alone, Craig plays Lee’s vulnerability.
Of course, there are drugs involved. Costume designer J. W. Anderson spoke of dressing Lee in cool whites when the substance of choice was cocaine to the colors for heroin use. A funny moment comes when a doctor asks the sick Lee, Are you addicted to opiates? Cut into chapters, “Queer” proceeds to South America as Lee looks to explore “telepathy;” Lee invites Allerton to travel with him in search of yage, a hallucinogenic drug. The jungle scenes feature an unrecognizable Lesley Manville as shaman—the one significant woman in this movie, a transformation from the male Dr. Cotter of the book.
Another significant change: insisting that “Queer” did not have an ending, Guadagnino and Kuritzkes supply one, bringing closure to their plot. As Guadagnino put it, the novel opens a door and then closes it. Guadagnino proposed, “What if we went through that door?”
The ending satisfies, but for the Beat community that made its way to the Chelsea Hotel for the after party, there was plenty to parse. Poet Anne Waldman, from Allen Ginsberg’s estate, Peter Hale, from Jack Kerouac’s estate Jim Sampas. Luca Guadadgnino was just happy that his film passed muster with the Beat crowd, and captured the book’s spirit.
