Of all movies by David Cronenberg that I've seen - which, admittedly, is not many- this film is definitely my least favorite, but that's not to say that there's nothing to recommend it. For one thing, since the movie is an adaptation of a William S. Burroughs novel that's famously difficult and obscure, and supposedly almost completely plot less, anyone not familiar with the book- like me- is probably not going to have as much appreciation for Cronenberg's sheer gall in taking on such difficult material. Still, I suspect I would have to be very into Burroughs before I see the film as anything than an interesting failure. Insofar as "Naked Lunch" has a plot, it involves a Burroughs alter ego named Bill Lee who works as an exterminator until he becomes hooked on his own "bug powder." Learning that the cops are after him, Bill becomes paranoid and, in what may or may not be an accident, shoots her in the head after telling her that, "it's time for our William Tell trick." He then escapes to "Interzone," a North African-like city populated mainly by gay American expatriates, which he files reports on under the orders of his typewriter, a giant talking insect. As I said, I haven't read Naked Lunch and can't really say what's from the book, but I do know that large sections of the screenplay are from some of Burrough's other, more coherent books. And maybe most disturbingly, much of the story is actually based on Burrough's own life, including his murder (?) of his wife. In fact, what Cronenberg has done here is closer to Adaptation than to a conventional adaptation, by making a movie about the writing of "Naked Lunch" (which I believe was written in North Africa, though maybe not with the help of any giant insects). Cronenberg's knack for creating unsettling, reality-stretching imagery is fully on display here, and for a while the film is just strange enough to be interesting. Still, Naked Lunch is much more boring than any movie about a man with a talking insect for a typewriter has a right to be, maybe because it's an adaptation of Serious, Important Literature. The film's sluggish quality might be partly due to Cronenberg's direction, which always has a controlled, intensely focused quality similar to Stanley Kubrick's, and while obviously accomplished on its own, might be wrong for the hallucinatory material in "Naked Lunch." Peter Weller, in yet another bizarre role (his others have included Buckaroo Banzai, Robocop, and the yuppie Ahab to an over-sized rat's Moby Dick in that epic masterpiece "Of Unknown Origin"), turns in a typically good, deadpan performance, but his character of Bill Lee/William Burroughs doesn't really develop in any particularly compelling ways, and this inert quality extends to the rest of the movie. For all of the weirdness that Cronenberg's work is known for, at his best he also creates narratives compelling enough to make his reality-bending games more than academic exercises and characters well-rounded enough to involve you emotionally in all of the mutations and distortions that take place. What Cronenberg has ended up with here is the sort of movie that's more interesting in theory than in practice.
Review of Naked Lunch
