Lately at the Movies
Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey pass the time, in Queer. Image courtesy of IMDb.
Queer has its heart in a good place, but wafts an awful lot of hot air.
I thought I was a Guadagnino guy, then I realised I haven’t even seen Call Me By Your Name yet. I thought I’d wait around for Queer because even from the trailer it looked a little over-wrought and self-congratulatory. But sometimes it’s a good-looking day out there and you just want to end it inside a theatre.
Daniel Craig plays William Lee: an expat in Mexico, in the 50s, with a healthy appetite for extracurricular activities with younger men. He swaggers around the gaff, his drink and his libido sloshing around the same glass, until a chance encounter with a young and perfect serviceman (the moment carelessly slathered in Come As You Are, by Nirvana) knocks him out one reverie and into another. He spends a small portion of the film trying to discern whether the lad has feelings for him, and then most of it wondering why those feelings fail to match his own in intensity. When Guadagnino means for us to acknowledge Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) for the irresistible beauty he is, he does loud, campy things; slows the camera down, pauses a world the colour of golden rum so we can admire Eugene’s chest in Very Tight Polo Shirts, and clears the table for Starkey to deliver bare-minimum lines that are supposed to sound devastating. When Lee invites him on a trip to Ecuador, in search of undiscovered psychedelics, Queer’s sparkling set devolves into an aesthetic mess, overly reliant on shoddy tech that a) can’t even render a poisonous snake properly and b) ventures visual abstractions that another misplaced Trent Reznor score tries to shove down our souls.
That set is almost too magical, presenting (for me) an uncomfortable portrait of the land as little more than an erotic playground for creatures (white ones) that we’re supposed to embrace as unanimously gorgeous and only flamboyantly flawed. It’s also not sturdy enough for the larger-than-life gumption Craig throws into Lee, which I can’t help but consume as kind of caricature. Distillating the script, which hails from a book by William S. Burroughs, these characters only really have three kinds of conversation — and Lee is in most of them thirsting towards his next conquest. Starkey broods and smoulders endlessly in an attempt to project Allerton’s shame at his own desires, but only gets five minutes or so to actually communicate any romantic resistance towards Lee. Guadagnino is just too busy trying to make visual and audio-visual statements, instead of building any real narrative momentum. Both Lee and Allerton have no clear personalities or interests outside the pursuit of sex, and it shows all over the dialogue.
Guadgnino appears to now be a recipient of blank American cheques, and seems to have lost interest in finding beauty in less glamorous rooms, less boisterous dialogue. It’s a damn shame, ‘cause that’s where and how you earn the meringue of the spectacular scenes he’s so impatient to execute.
A Different Man is more riveting than it ought to be.
When it comes to disfigurement drama, I’m generally outsies — have been since Vanilla Sky; which I was too young for and which subsequently helped deepen my distrust of human nature, including my own, and of Tom Cruise. I will never see The Elephant Man so cut it out with the robo-calls, please. I will, however, recommend that you see A Different Man if it’s a pretty enough day outside, and you’re thinking maybe I should waste this in a theatre.
Sebastian Stan may very well emerge from the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe smorgasbord with the most interesting post-Thanos career. I could have done without the cannibalistic turn of Fresh, which (though entertaining) struck me as the sort of hard left an actor performs to assure you they possess range. (I’m open-minded, most of the time. You don’t have to scream these things into my headphones …) Though The Apprentice struck me as existing just a little too soon — I don’t think artistic hindsight is a feasible exercise whilst a train crash is still in motion — Stan’s Trump was a commendable foil for yet more scintillating method work by Jeremy Strong. So maybe that movie works, in time, not as a profile of the 44th President but of a civic landscape where law and order are up for negotiation. The most refreshing thing about this actor in A Different Man, though, is his readiness to inflect seemingly mundane standoffs with presence.
Edward Lemuel is an aspiring actor with neurofibromatosis, a condition that can disfigure a person’s facial appearance significantly. We are offered straightforward opportunities to empathise early on. How hard it must be to nail a scene when no one can make out your expressions. How limiting it must feel to only ever star in videos targeting the extremely small minority of people, nationwide, who share your specific medical distress. How hard it must be to ride the train. How much it must suck to sit across a couch from an empathetic neighbour, to make a connection, whilst all the while resigning oneself to the fact that they will only connect so far. The script accomplishes this with zero melodrama in roughly 20 minutes, and it’s genuinely captivating.
That neighbour (Renata Reinsve, from The Worst Person in the World) turns out to harbour a little more, or a little less, than typical manic-pixie-dream-girl-next-door energy, when she pens a somewhat exploitative play about a friend with a disfigured face. By this point Edward has already undergone a successful surgery, and decides to wander into Ingrid’s ‘off-Broadway’ audition as (ahem) a different man. He does so with a mask that looks eerily familiar. Your buyer’s remorse for this transformation, what sort of change it portends in Edward, whether it really means anything in the long-run if he continues to hide, sets in way before Edward’s; when Oswald (played by Adam Pearson, who has real-life neurofibromatosis) swaggers onto centre-stage with both a posh British accent and near-complete acceptance of who he is.
The great accomplishment of Stan’s performance is that he maintains the same levels of vacancy and loneliness as his character spirals from isolation and insecurity into jealousy and paranoia. The great accomplishment of this script is it surrounds him with creatures, none of them single-note archetypes, who artfully disguise tolerance as love and affection.
The film’s director Aaron Schimberg eventually runs out of awkward scenarios to play with, and ultimately decides to pie the production in the face with a set-piece of violent absurdity. I shook my head, nonplussed, but didn’t feel robbed of anything in the end.
