Down and Out in Mexico City

Director Luca Guadagnino, just six months after the release of his sexy hit Challengers, has taken on an ambitious adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ Queer, starring Daniel Craig as the Burroughs stand-in, a sumptuous 1950s look, and lots of explicit sex. There’s great stuff here, starting with Craig’s performance, the visual style and costumes, and an out-of-left-field, against-type supporting performance from Jason Schwartzman. But Queer squanders a great start with a meandering second half, which reminded me why there are few things less enjoyable in a movie than watching other people do drugs.

Based on Burroughs’ novel, written in the 1950s but not published until the 1980s, Queer was adapted by Justin Kuritzkes, who also wrote Challengers. The film stars Craig as “Lee,” an American expat in early-1950s Mexico City who wears tasteful white linen suits, drinks and smokes constantly, dabbles in harder drugs, and ultimately becomes smitten, to the point of obsession, with a young sailor named Eugene (Drew Starkey) who may or may not be gay. Such modern labels on sexuality don’t exactly square with the 1950s worldview of Burroughs, who at one point had a wife, Joan Volmer, who he infamously accidentally killed in a game of William Tell in 1951.

In its first half, Queer builds this world, of middle-aged gay men who’ve fled to Mexico City, an approximation of which the director has built in his native Italy. And part of Lee’s coterie is Joe, played by Schwartzman with a beard and extra weight; the character is likely channeling Allen Ginsberg to some degree. In a year with multiple strong performances from Schwartzman, this is one of the best. In the film’s back half, as Lee and Eugene head to Central America to find an ayahuasca root, Queer becomes a different and much less interesting movie. The scene where the characters take a hallucinogenic drug trip, and it’s visualized for us, is rarely done very well by the movies, including half the comedies of the last 15 years. Easy Rider is one of the only films to do it well.

Movies have always had a hard time with Burroughs’ work, which was never very straightforward or naturally cinematic. You hear a lot about old movies that never could be made today, but Queer’s one that could never have been made before now, especially with an A-list star performing fairly explicit gay sex scenes.

David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch adaptation from 1991 is a fairly divisive work, and I’m somewhat partial to Beat, the little-seen 2000 movie, also set in Mexico City, in which Kiefer Sutherland played Burroughs and Courtney Love as Vollmer. Queer is only about halfway to a great Burroughs adaptation.