Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 29, 1992 TAG: 9202290232
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRIS GLADDEN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
`NAKED LUNCH' IS BIZARRE BUT LIKELY TO BE A CULT CLASSIC
Suffice it to say there won't be another movie quite like "Naked Lunch," David Cronenberg's grotesquely funny take on William S. Burroughs' underground novel.If this movie were made a couple of decades ago, it probably would have been full of impenetrable interior monologues.
But this is a more visual era, and Cronenberg is an aficionado of special effects. He's taken Burroughs' writings, mixed them with incidents from his life, infused it all with a pervasive paranoia and turned the movie into an absorbing, dead-pan hallucination. It's the portrait of the artist as a young, mentally unbalanced junkie.
Cronenberg takes a big risk, and it pays off. He doesn't separate fantasy from reality. He takes all the bizarre elements and lays them out matter-of-factly with no attempt at any kind of analysis or explanation. Only occasionally does anything resembling reality intrude. In one such telling moment, the hero shows friends the pieces of his writing device he's carting around in a bag. Instead of the broken typewriter that he believed was in the the bag, he discovers a vast array of drug paraphernalia.
Peter Weller, who is taking a distinct career turn from his roles as RoBoCop, plays Bill Lee, the Burroughs character. As the movie begins, Lee is an exterminator in 1953 determinedly not trying to write. It's too dangerous, he says. One day, Lee comes home and finds his wife (Judy Davis) shooting up his bug powder. Another day he comes home and finds her and one of his friends making love. They were bored, she says. Lee says it's time for their William Tell routine, and she puts a glass on her head. He pulls out a gun and shoots her dead, which is what happened to Burroughs' wife in real life.
At this point, Lee is having conversations with a giant bug who says that Lee is an agent and is needed to send reports from the Interzone. He flees to the exotic locale and meets another couple with whom he becomes involved: fellow writers played by Ian Holm and Davis again.
Here, Lee is drawn deeper into substance abuse in the form of a powder made from centipedes and a fluid from dinosaur-like creatures called mugwumps. His typewriters turn into giant bugs that talk to him and lead him to acknowledging his homosexuality. Out of all this emerges the reluctant writer whose book is formed from the "reports" he sends from the Interzone.
Weller is perfect as the terse, sarcastic hipster as Davis is as the slatternly, insecticide-addicted wife. Cronenberg, who made his reputation with such stylish horror movies as "Scanners" and "The Fly," has taken his penchant for the bizarre and grotesque and turned it into a unique comedy.
Like Burroughs' novel, "Naked Lunch" - the movie - is destined to become a cult classic.
`Naked Lunch': *** A Twentieth Century-Fox picture at the Grandin Theatre (345-6177). Rated R for language, sexual content and special effects; two hours.