DAN WEBSTER:
Even before he starred in his first James Bond feature film, Daniel Craig had already carved out an admirable career. He’d played in big-screen adventures (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider) and serious bio-pics (playing Ted Hughes to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Sylvia Plath in Sylvia), comedy-dramas (Layer Cake) and intense politically minded dramas (Munich).
But everything changed in 2006 when Craig was cast in Casino Royale, making him the 6th actor to play the British assassin Double-O-Seven (the seventh if you include David Niven in the 1967 spy parody Casino Royale).
Craig would appear in five Bond films in all, culminating in 2021’s No Time to Die. By then Craig was in his 50s and a bit old to be playing a dashing spy.
He took one step to change his image when he agreed to play the Southern private detective Benoit Blanc in the comedy-mysteries Knives Out and Glass Onion. And he’s set to play Blanc a third time in the forthcoming Wake Up Dead Man, set for a 2025 release.
Nothing, though, could match the change that Craig made by appearing in director Luca Guadagnino’s film titled Queer. An adaptation of William S Burroughs’ 1985 novella, and written by Justin Kuritzkes, Queer features Craig as a character about as far from a James Bond type as could be imagined.
Craig plays William Lee, a gay man living in 1950s Mexico City. He’s in the country, he says, because of his addiction to heroin, a fact that, again he says, would make him a criminal at home. Never without a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, Lee clearly is a troubled character.
What’s troubling him, though, isn’t made clear. Yet this was some seven decades ago, remember, long before the sexual revolution of the 1960s and a 21st-century larger cultural recognition, and widespread (if not universal) acceptance, of diversity in terms of sexual orientation. Being gay these days is not a crime. But in the ’50s, it was considered so in much of the U.S.
So as Lee wanders through the city, a pistol openly attached to his belt, a sense of desperation seems to haunt every connection he attempts to make, whether with friends, such as the bearded Joe Guidry (played by a nearly unrecognizable Jason Schwartzman), or with the occasional lover.
And then things change—at least a bit and for a while—when he encounters Eugene Allerton (played by Drew Starkey), an attractive, somewhat mysterious younger man whose own sexual orientation is unclear. Though seemingly open to Lee’s attention, Allerton also keep company with a woman, with whom he plays chess.
Lee perseveres, though, and soon he and Allerton are lovers. Then Lee, ever frantic to continue their relationship, proposes that they head to South America where a researcher (played by Leslie Manville) has been working on a plant that, when brewed, becomes the hallucinogen ayahuasca. What most interests Lee is the drug’s potential for making those who take it telepathic.
Whatever the truth of that, the resulting experience with ayahuasca is, for both men, something straight out of a waking nightmare. Captured by director Guadagnino (and Thai-born cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, who had worked previously with Guadagnino on the films Call Me by Your Name and Challengers), the drug sequence is as symbolic—and unnerving—as it is R-rated.
That’s only natural, though. Queer is based on a novel that was written while Burroughs was waiting to see what would happen after he, supposedly accidentally, shot and killed his wife, Joan Vollmer… an event that Guadagnino references in his film, though—again—with a purpose symbolic of Lee’s future with Allerton.
Guadagnino’s adaptation is, as is his style, florid in its use of imagery and affecting in its portrayal of characters seeking emotional release through connections that so often are tormented in their quest to be fulfilling.
As for the film’s lead, playing William Lee is likely to leave Daniel Craig’s career just where the former 007 wants it: conveniently shaken, if not stirred.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com.
