ROMANTIC DRAMA; 2hr 16min
STARRING: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey
James who? Craig (foreground) and Starkey
William Lee (Craig) is probably not a man another man might care to encounter in a dark alley, let alone an alley in 1950 Mexico City on a night when Lee has been drinking (i.e., virtually any night) and is prowling for a hook-up (ditto).
Lee is a middle-aged American boozehound and heroin addict who tosses back shots as if his dissolute life depends on them. In a way it does, since apart from the jittery impetus that keeps him going and the short fuse that sets him off, there’s nothing much else in the offing — until on his aimless nocturnal travels he spots ex-GI and fellow expat Eugene Allerton (Starkey). In that instant Lee is transfixed. Maybe it’s Eugene’s long-limbed elegance, polished and sharpened by youth, or maybe it’s his ambiguous elusiveness, but William Lee is a goner.
The two eventually become lovers in scenes of urgent tenderness from Call Me by Your Name director Luca Guadagnino. Yet while Lee is never less than nakedly up-front, the coolly ambivalent Eugene is less easy to read, retreating into curtness while keeping his distance with a lady friend (Andra Ursuta), the extent of whose relationship with him is unclear.
That Lee is about to get his heart ripped out (in more ways than one, as it happens) deters neither him — wasted and stripped of pride — nor Craig’s unstinting empathy for his subject’s tormented isolation. The third chapter of Lee and Eugene’s exploitative relationship takes a skiddy turn into Lynchian territory with a trip to the jungles of Ecuador, where Lee seeks a telepathy-inducing plant. What awaits them there, courtesy of a half-bonkers nativist doctor (an all-but-unrecognisable Lesley Manville), is a mind-melding, ayahuasca trip that is both vintage William S. Burroughs (on whose 1985 novella Justin Kuritzkes’s unwieldy screenplay is based) and a twisted fork in what was never a sustainable road. Craig cuts a tragic swathe through its every stumble and fall.
