directed by Bryan Singer
written by Anthony McCarten and Peter Morgan
The long-gestating Freddie Mercury biopic finally comes to the big screen, with American actor Rami Malek delivering a stunning performance as one of the most iconic rock stars of all time.
Bohemian Rhapsody, which tells, very loosely, the story of the rock band Queen from its inception to its legendary performance at the 1985 Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium, actually plays pretty much by the numbers. It starts with their humble beginnings; Freddie Mercury, aka Farokkh Bulsara (Malek) the humble immigrant from Zanzibar (now Tanzania) works at Heathrow airport unpacking luggage from airplanes, but already dreams of being a performer. His dream gets a boost when he joins the college campus band Smile consisting of Brian May (Gwilym Lee) and Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy), whose vocalist has just abandoned them. They are joined by bassist John Deacon (Joe Mazzello), and the band Queen is born. Also joining Freddie in his meteoric rise to the top is Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton) a saleslady with whom Freddie strikes up a romance, and who later proves to be the single most important person in his life. As the band goes from strength to strength and rockets to superstardom with their iconoclastic approach to making music, fame and all its trappings start to get to them, and to Freddie in particular as he struggles with his sexuality, and threaten to tear them all apart.
Much has been written about how this film handled its controversial subject matter, Freddie Mercury, with kid gloves and to be fair, one does get the sense that the narrative has been sanitized a bit. I can't say I'm too surprised given how closely the surviving band members supervised production. One scene in particular, in which the three other band members leave Freddie's party with their wives when things start to get a bit wild, had me rolling my eyes a little bit, not because I don't think it ever happened, but because the suggestion that Mercury was the only wild child of the bunch seemed patently absurd. Still, this movie was about Freddie first and foremost, and I can't imagine anyone getting in line to see a movie about Roger Taylor's marital travails. Ultimately, though, this kind of storytelling choice contributes to the impression that the film went a bit easy on the band.
What I find grossly unfair, though, is how some critics seem sorely disappointed that the film declined to portray Mercury's sexual misadventures explicitly and chose, instead to leave most of the debauchery to the imagination. It's even resulted in shock-value comedian Sacha Baron Cohen getting undeserved airtime for the assertion that his portrayal would have been "outrageous" in terms of Mercury's homosexuality, which tells me that his enthusiasm for the project was less about honoring Mercury's music and more about finding yet another excuse to show off his pale ass again, and quite frankly, thanks to Borat I've seen enough of naked Sacha Baron Cohen to last me ten lifetimes.
The thing is, the movie is aptly called "Bohemian Rhapsody" rather than "Freddie" or even "Queen" because it's less about Freddie or the band and their quirks and is more about how their music, more than the diva tantrums or the drugs or the orgies, was what defined them. We got to glimpse the painstaking gestation of not only "Bohemian Rhapsody" but also Queen's other celebrated anthem, "We Will Rock You" and even the off-beat "Another One Bites the Dust" which was apparently born during an argument between the band members. Sure, we basically saw what the remainder of the band wanted us to see, but when the climax of the movie is a gorgeously-recreated version of the 1985 Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium, it's hard to begrudge them their vision, even if it doesn't feel like an entirely honest one.
It's also hard to dislike a film with a lead performance as mesmerizing as that of Rami Malek, who, as even the most curmudgeonly of critics has acknowledged, carries the entire movie. I don't pretend to have known Freddie Mercury in any capacity, but there was something utterly captivating about seeing Malek doing his level best to recapture Mercury's boundless energy as he ad-lib-pranced across the stage, and thus creating an energy of his own. Baron Cohen would not have pulled this off, not in his wildest dreams. While I'll admit that Malek's main job was basically to pantomime Mercury belting out his greatest hits, it simply wouldn't have worked if he hadn't exuded charisma in virtually every moment that the camera is on him, even through those massive prosthetic teeth, and even in Freddie's darkest moments of self-doubt and self-loathing. One thing that did seem off to me, though, was that Malek looked a bit skinnier than Freddie but that was a minor quibble.
It helps that capable actors are cast as the rest of the band, though really, they barely make an impression with the way they're written. It was weirdly entertaining, though to see the kid from Jurassic Park play Queen's bassist John Deacon. Everyone else is in the cast is just okay, though Allen Leech as the villainous manager Paul Prenter played the character a bit too broad; I half-expected him to twirl his mustache at one point. One cameo that particularly stood out, though, was Mike Myers as Ray Foster, the small-minded (and fictional) record executive at EMI who refused to release Bohemian Rhapsody as the band's carrier single. As anyone over forty knows, Myers revitalized the song in America when he featured it in the opening scene of his popular film Wayne's World back in 1992. Having him assert that no kids would ever play that song in their cars and bang their heads to it was a pretty gratifying payoff.
it's a shame Bryan Singer couldn't keep it together to finish this movie, because as the Wembley Studio sequence he shot shows, he's still got the touch that mades his X-Men movies eminently watchable.
So yes, the movie has its fair share of problems, most of them with the writing, but a magnetic performance by its lead and those infectious songs are enough to pretty much carry the day, just as they were in The Greatest Showman.
7/10
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