Almost There: Daniel Craig in "Queer"
Saturday, March 1, 2025 at 10:00PM 
Apart from Call Me By Your Name, awards voters rarely see anything worth celebrating in Luca Guadagnino's cinema. In some ways, this season seemed to be a change of pace on that front, with Challengers and Queer going into Oscar nomination morning with some hopes. Sadly, they both got blanked. And while the tennis melodrama was mostly vying for "below the line" honors, Queer had its sight set on a Best Actor nomination, the first piece of Academy Award recognition for the erstwhile Bond, Daniel Craig. Ultimately, the William S. Burroughs adaptation was probably too weird for AMPAS' tastes, but we're here to recognize a performance that's nothing if not Oscar-worthy…
How a film starts can tell us a lot about its intentions and strategies. In Queer's case, the piece opens on an overture of sorts, colorful credits across painterly arrangements of props on a bed. In some ways, Guadagnino is distilling the film to come into objects, making for a welcoming gesture that's also a summary. It reduces life to moments and moments to material form, fragmented yet curated as if part of a museum installation. These are not mere illustrations, but a snapshot of a soul. But whose soul is it? The fictional Lee's or William S. Burroughs'? While we'll see these props again during Queer's narrative, the sequence's closing shot lands on an exception.
It's a manuscript, annotated and scribbled over, perchance about to be stuffed into a letter to Kerouac or some other writer correspondent. This isn't Lee's, it's William's. Then again, is there a difference? Written between Junkie and Naked Lunch, though published decades after both, Queer is something of a solipsistic reflection, a novel of withdrawal composed during a period when the author was experiencing anything but. Lee, the writer protagonist, is a mirror and a distortion. Though, at the same time, those discrepancies from the real writer are more revealing than not. They illuminate the mind from which the character blossomed, its wants, its needs, its self-hatred and self-mythologization.
By opening Queer on a de-fragmentation of Lee and then plunging into his story through a meta-textual underlining of Burroughs' writing, the director is blurring the lines between men. He's warning of a film that's less interested in the novel's story than its tone, the feeling perspired and cried and ejaculated unto the page. He's also throwing one hell of a challenge to the leading man. Daniel Craig is playing Lee as a character and a fragment from another man's imagination, he's playing a body inflamed by desire and the projected reflection of an author the film never directly dramatizes. These notions become more critical for the last act, but the opening salvo immediately invokes them.
They are also present in Craig's performance from minute one, as Lee shares a drink and a smoke with a freckled Jewish boy in a Mexican bar, sometime in the 1950s. Their conversation is initially shot in Ozu-like compositions, almost looking at the actors straight on so that we're both observant and participants, within and without. The same quality applies to Craig's approach, a cadence full of pauses and demonstrative thinking. You can practically hear the cogs whirring inside the man's head, coming up with the witticisms he dispels with a forceful false cool. It's an odd idea, but we're watching Lee invent himself in real-time, writing his own story as he lives it, artist and creation in one.
Or maybe just an honest depiction of a neurotic who can't confront life on his own terms, someone who acts rather than reacts in the most performative sense, whose every interaction is a rehearsed spectacle. Lee is a man of routines, after all, self-conscious to the point of flop sweat and forever eager to delight. He's also keenly aware of when his acts are getting the reception he wants or if they're another disaster in a string of disappointments. His swagger is a doped-up performance, and, at times, even Lee seems tired of his antics. But he can't help it. After a pause, a moment of introspective exhaustion and a go at disassociation when talking to a Platonic friend – literalized by his body going transparent like a television phantasm - he's back on his bullshit.
And here comes another rejection and another deflection, another forceful projection of nonplussed disinterest that fools nobody, not even the camera, not even himself. In these cycles of delusionary confidence and its bruised aftermath, Lee catches a glimpse of a beautiful man. For once, Craig becomes laser-focused rather than diffuse. He's besotted. Sure, it leads to another indignity as Lee tries to be charming but ends up looking like a sad clown. However, it makes evident how much this lad will mean to the man going forward. The addict has found a new drug of choice, and his name's Allerton, played by Drew Starkey to callous perfection, withholding to the point of being more mirage than man.
Which is pretty much the opposite of Lee as Craig plays him. This disaster of an expat writer is always giving, always exposing himself like an open wound whose scabs get picked apart on the regular, never allowing it to heal. While one can see a lot of that in the failed flirtations, it's even more acute when that social charade works or when a proffered dollar can buy temporary closeness. In other words, when Lee gets in bed with one of his lovers. We first see him with a local hustler – Omar Apollo, gorgeous and dazed – who he takes to his preferred hotel, bathed in a red light that seems to strip away the illusion of self-assuredness.
Naked in more ways than one, Craig is all need, reducing himself to a body prostrated at the altar of queer desire, ready to please without ever thinking about being pleased. Soon enough, he'll get to worship Allerton, too, and he won't even have to pay for it. The night comes after days of over-eager fraternizing and a most uncomfortable dinner date where Lee notably doesn't touch his food, not once. He also serves up a whole slab of self-loathing, weaponized as a disarming strategy, a seduction that passes through the offering of one's soul as a sacrificial lamb. The vulnerability is genuine, the shame real, but it's deployed in a studied manner that reads as a flirtation with self-destruction.
From there, Guadagnino's camera follows the pair through the streets and into Lee's apartment, communicating a dance that's got the trepidation of cruising down pat even as it unravels according to more romantic models. Craig curiously does the opposite of what most great actors try when playing drunk. Rather than showing Lee downplaying the intoxication, he portrays a man who overemphasizes how shitfaced he is. The same old jester routine takes place, but also the shadow of an insecure, frightened kid who wants to pet a feral cat. It's about making himself look harmless as much as it is about inviting a good fuck.
What ensues is one of the great sex scenes in recent cinema, gorgeously shot by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to suggest a transcendental experience. Instead of titillating the audience, the scene is about exposing the characters. Not so much their bodies as their interiority, whether it's been kept secret or open until now. For his part, Craig plays it with equal parts eagerness and gentility, even going for some euphoria that, again, makes his shoe-leather visage suggest a childish kind of sentiment – pure joy. The most moving moment might be when, after his orgasm, Allerton reciprocates and touches Lee.
You can see he wasn't expecting it, and the ensuing mix of surprise and gratitude is enough to take one's breath away. Crucially, it sets the stage for all that's to come, telegraphing how much this connection with the younger man means to Lee. He'll stay by his side until the bitter end if he can, and there's no amount of cruelty he won't endure on the way there. No amount of humiliation, either. Not when squealing like a pig gets Allerton to smile, or when a bit of silliness behind closed doors gets him a sweet kiss. It'd be easy to play all this as if Lee were merely a slave to desire, but Guadagnino and Craig and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes go for amorous resonance in tandem with the men's carnal connection.
Lee is in love and Queer depicts that phenomenon warts and all, looking straight at the agony and the ecstasy, lucid about being delirious but unwilling to deny how good it feels to destroy oneself in devotion to another. I suppose someone can accept all this as truth about the performance and the film without necessarily concluding any of it makes worthwhile cinema. It's all a bit relentless, smashing the same note on the keyboard over and over again. Apart from flares of jealousy, the occasional anger bleeding from his open heart, Craig's Lee doesn't change a whole lot through Queer. Love doesn't transform him, merely reveals him. In that regard, Starkey has much more of an arc, a slippery cold statue that becomes tender flesh, though it's always painful to look directly at him. To Lee, he's a sun you'll stare at, blindness be damned.
There's certainly more of a notable difference between Allerton as that mirage and the young man in the throes of a bad trip describing himself as disembodied. In some ways, Queer starts with Lee at the place where Allerton ends, making for a complicated dynamic between its two leads. Describing the thing makes it sound more dysfunctional than it is. Well, more incoherent, surely. Because Queer is quite coherent no matter how much it shapeshifts into outright surrealism when the two lovers go deep into the jungle in search of a powerful hallucinogen that supposedly allows for communication without speech, connection beyond human understanding. Even its flashes of Burroughs' biography are presaged by the opening, a snake eating its own tail.
By the time I'm writing this, I've seen Queer three times – four if you count a screenshot-taking revisit – and it keeps growing in my estimation. I can accept many of the now familiar criticisms of its listlessness, how it uses Burroughs' ambivalences to avoid more concrete takes on its characters and setting, how it often feels like it's spinning in place, going nowhere past the pain of male solitude it synthesizes well enough by the end of its first act. And yet, I keep discovering new pleasures and insights, new queer specificities in its perspective and its sorrows. The same applies to Craig's Oscar-snubbed performance.
His creation grows richer with each re-watch. There's a rhapsody of debasement in his character work, a grotesque quality that repels and compels, that demands recognition even as the viewer might wish to think themselves as different from Lee/William as humanly possible. As he delivers the best turn of his career – there, I said it – Daniel Craig takes Guadagnino's film on a path of transmuting feeling, toward a pathetic sublime. Without him, I doubt that flashforward – or dream, or anticipation of future grief – into the yearnings of a dying man would hit as hard as it does. Indeed, I doubt it'd leave me as breathless as I've found myself every time I return to Queer, knocked out, crushed in the best way.
Queer premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it met mixed reviews. Craig, however, was praised across the board, and that reception followed him and the film into TIFF. As the awards started, he quickly became one of the top contenders in the Best Actor race, earning dozens upon dozens of nominations from regional groups. Moreover, he won the NBR and was nominated for the Golden Globe, the Critics Choice Award, and by SAG. That last one is especially telling, since Queer is so out of the guild's comfort zone, both in style, theme, and actorly approach. However, Craig missed with BAFTA, an important sign of trouble.
In the end, he missed out on the Oscar nomination thanks, in significant part, to the rise of Sebastian Stan, whose profile grew exponentially with his Golden Globe victory for A Different Man. But, of course, the Marvel star turned prestige actor didn't get to the Oscar lineup with that Silver Bear-winning dark comedy. Instead, his Donald Trump in The Apprentice got him there. The other nominees are Adrien Brody in The Brutalist, Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown, Colman Domingo in Sing Sing, and Ralph Fiennes in Conclave. Right now, the race seems to be between the singer and the architect, while Daniel Craig will have to wait a little longer for his first Academy Award nomination.
You can rent Queer from Amazon Video, Apple TV, Plex, Fandango at Home, the Microsoft Store, and Spectrum On Demand.
Reader Comments (5)
I loved reading this.
I'm not able to wrtte as eloquently and throroughly as you but i'll just say I agreed with all that was written.
I watched it twice and enjoyed it 2nd time round even more,the costumes are gorgeous,pastel flanels never looked so sexy and the minimal special effects are the sort of effects I enjoy,I felt sweaty watching it.
Some of my favourite bits of actorly business this year are contained in this film,that strange little bow he does on first seeing Allerton and the strange trippy sex dance in the jungle.
I was happy to see Craig who I never liked as Bond embrace the queerness of the role and this took me back to the first time I saw him in Love Is The Devil which is another off kilter queer film from 98 which got no Oscar love,it reminded me a lot of that films tempo.
Where was the supporting actress praise for Lesley Manville,what did you think of her Claudio,i'm sure she can do anything.
Luca is one of the best director's of actors at the moment,some of my favourite performances of this year came from his 2 films.
The jungle bit never really bothered me though I know some had problems with it.
Craig was totally deserving of the nod. And Manville REALLY should have been a nominee as well. I didn't even realize it was her until the credits.
Robbed, snubbed, SNUBBED!
Mr Ripley79 -- Thank you for the kind words. Also, "I felt sweaty watching it" is a great way to put it. Anyway, I'm glad you liked this Almost There write-up because you won't feel the same about the next one, which, sadly, will only be posted after the Oscars - Marianne Jean-Baptiste in HARD TRUTHS.
Angelo -- At TIFF, I had lunch with a fellow critic after we both watched QUEER and he felt the same about Manville. Didn't even realize it was her.
Frank Zappa -- YES!
I look forward to the Marianne write up,
I don't want to be hating on such an overlooked actress but her performance left me scratching my head especially as she is so at ease and natural in Secrets and Lies.
I had her at my number one position all year for my own awards and now she's languishing at number 10,I was sure she'd cake walk it to be my winner.
When all around her are being so natural and real she seems to be going way over the top and pushing too hard and lacking any calibration in her anger and the dinner table scene is badly written and doesn't work but i'm willing to be persuaded.
It was my biggest disappointment this year as i'm a huge Leigh fan but I just thought this went nowhere.
I thought you might do an Almost There on those Last Showgirl ladies or Sebastian Stan's alternate role which more people seem to be keen on than his Trump turn.