James Bond Gives Hand Jobs in Mexico
'Queer' stars Daniel Craig in another disgustingly gorgeous Guadagnino movie, which combines the gay scene in 50s Mexico City with Nirvana songs, and turns on how much you enjoy William S. Burroughs.
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“One ticket for Queer, please. …I’m not gay, I just like movies.”
I’m kidding about being that insecure, of course, though it’s also true that Luca Guadagnino’s new adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ novel starring Daniel Craig probably isn’t one I’d try to drag the guys from my fantasy football league to. Shame for them, since the acclaimed visionary behind Call Me By Your Name, Bones and All, and Challengers is one of our finest living shooters, seemingly constitutionally incapable of staging an ugly scene. Every image moves. Every actor’s skin glows. And in an increasingly sexless world, Guadagnino is extremely horny and dangerously Italian.
With his seven English-language films, Guadagnino has become our bard of bottomless desire, and Daniel Craig spends virtually all of Queer visibly yearning so hungrily he’s practically making an unnnghhhhhhh sound. I was admittedly a little iffy on the concept. Less due to the gay themes than to the idea of a highly-paid, mainstream actor like Craig seemingly using a queer-themed arthouse film to expand his personal brand. What do they call that, again? “Queerbaiting,” I believe. But then, maybe that’s presumptuous. How much do I really know about Daniel Craig, anyway? I’m reminded of the famous Tom Hardy quote: “Of course I’ve had gay sex. I’m an actor!”
In any case it’s hard not to wonder if Craig is stealing a role from an actually queer actor here, while simultaneously wondering if it’s hopelessly rigid, sex negative, maybe even anti-art to wonder such things. Anyone should be able to play anything, of course, and yet the tie always seems to go to the famous guy. In this case at least it’s fitting, since “queerbaiting,” and the concept of “passing” are some of Queer’s central themes. To his credit, Craig is far more interesting in this nuanced portrayal of a hopelessly horny gay expat heroin addict in 1950s Mexico than he has been any of the “quirky” post-Bond roles people seem to love him in so much (Knives Out, Logan Lucky — we get it, you can do a silly accent.).
“People and place” are the root of all stories, and it’d be hard to find a more enchanting combination than this one. Craig plays William Lee (by most accounts a thinly-veiled stand-in for Queer’s author, William S. Burroughs, to the point that it was his some-time pen name), an unabashedly gay man drinking and drugging his way through the thriving post-war gay scene in Mexico City. Lee’s best pal is Joe Guidry (a truly fantastic Jason Schwartzman, whose fat makeup lands him somewhere between swarthy George Costanza and Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder), another horny guy whose trysts with younger studs are constantly getting him robbed. “Have you ever considered not taking them back to your place? That’s what hotels are for,” quips Lee, ever the worldy raconteur.
Lately Lee has developed an intense crush on Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), an infuriatingly laconic hunk whose limited vocabulary and inability to say anything remotely committal only serve to make him that much hotter. What could he even say that his high pecs and supple-yet-sinewy torso haven’t already said better?
Queer is, essentially, a story about a mooning old junkie who falls hard for a gorgeous younger guy who constantly makes Lee question whether Eugene even likes boys — which is, of course, a big part of Eugene’s appeal. Lee and Guidry disparage Mexico City’s more transparently homosexual expats (who hang out at a different bar entirely) as queeny old fags, so uninteresting to them as to barely warrant mentioning. Certainty is so dull, and yet they can’t help groping at it.
The essential dynamic, of going gaga for beauty we can’t have, is universal, even if the particular circumstances are hyper-specific. And that’s Guadagnino’s wheelhouse in a nutshell. No director alive could get as much mileage out of this story — the sights and sounds of 50s Mexico alone, with the adobe walls, twirling ceiling fans, and ever-present blanket of perspiration… Queer is a marvel before it gets repetitive.
Its existence itself feels like a near miracle. At what other time in history could we get a movie starring James Bond, wobbling mezcal drunk around 50s Mexico getting vigorous handjobs and giving sloppy oral, shot by the darling of indie cinema and set to new wave needle drops, slowed down dramatic covers of Nirvana, and actual Nirvana songs, all scored by the guys from Nine Inch Nails? Hard to know whether “everyone is gay,” “come as you are,” or “I wanna fuck you like an animal” are the most on-the-nose 90s song lyrics here (the first two featuring prominently in Queer’s musical accompaniment, the latter left out presumably as a matter of restraint).
My biggest issue with Queer is essentially how badly I wanted it to be something else. These characters, who apparently spend their entire lives getting dangerously intoxicated and getting into sexual imbroglios, have no obvious source of income and all speak vaguely of intelligence work they’ve done (certainly past, possibly present?) — all backdropped by newspaper headlines about nuclear secrets and Mao, in a frontier atmosphere full of mysterious characters and ulterior motives. Casting the actor who played James Bond feels especially relevant, since most of the real-life James Bond types we know about sound more like William Lee than James Bond. Which is to say: ambiguously queer and indisputably drunk (while also generally products of great privilege and elite educations). The Cambridge Five meets J. Edgar Hoover.
Craig wears a pistol in a holster around his belt for the entire movie, which for Checkhov would’ve been obvious foreshadowing, but for Burroughs seems more of a style choice. Maybe wanting Queer to capitalize on, or at least explore, some of that underlying international intrigue is tantamount to reading Burroughs and asking why he isn’t Graham Greene. Yet I can’t help it. Are you spies? Are you generationally wealthy? I don’t need disclaimers telling me which characters are rich, but I need to know why they never worry about money. Burroughs always seems to devolve into drug-addled existentialism to avoid the subjects.
A Graham Greene novel isn’t the only other thing I kind of wanted Queer to be. The Burroughs depicted here feels almost like an origin story for John Goodman’s character in Inside Llewyn Davis — the pretentious, lecherous old heroin addict with the handsome, nearly non-verbal and vaguely malevolent younger boyfriend, played wonderfully in that movie, which is one of my all-time favorites, by Garrett Hedlund. Of course, that was more akin to an outsider’s send-up of Burroughs, whereas Queer is true to Burroughs’ largely earnest self-portrait. Did he know he was becoming a cliché? In one scene, William Lee himself gives voice to the banal predictability of the kinds of junkie narratives he now finds himself part of (brilliantly performed by Craig) — which comes off presciently self-aware, but not quite to the point of comedy or insight.
Some of the best parts of Queer are just Craig and Schwartzman, sitting around with the fellas discussing their latest peccadillos over a 1 pm breakfast of 15 or 20 tequila shots. A queer Cold War expat Seinfeld in which George, Jerry, and Kramer are all pants-shitting drunks is something I never knew I wanted before but now absolutely do. A twink stabbed me in the kidney, Jerry!
Oh no, he was a kidney stabber?
A kidney stabber, Jerry! And he shot up half my China White!
/Kramer crashes through a stand of barstools, and stands up holding stolen blueprints for a Turkish missile installment.
Hey, have you guys seen this??
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