Even going into Bohemian Rhapsody fairly indifferent because I tend to be mostly indifferent to the works of director, Bryan Singer, I was surprised to find myself getting worked up by the film. At least, worked up in basically all the wrong ways.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The film, which was written by Anthony McCarten, covers the rise of the rock band, Queen, through the perspective of its larger-than-life lead singer, Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek). It explores their early exploits to them hitting big as an international success, and how the success affects Mercury’s personal life and his relationship with the band.
I can see why someone could find the film entertaining. It’s made with a lot of flash and pizazz, it moves fast, and it movies from hit song to hit song to keep things engaging and snappy. It’s fairly well made and performed, so there’s nothing inherently wrong with it from a technical standpoint, but underneath all that gloss is where you start seeing the problems.
The biggest issue with the film is that it takes a band renowned for their unconventional style and appeal, and it throws them into not just a painfully watered down, PG-13 rendition of their story, but it also forces their story into the mold of every generic Hollywood biopic, the kind that should be impossible to make with a straight face in a post-Walk Hard world. It utilizes every bad impulse you’d find in these kinds of biopic, from story beats flowing like a Wikipedia summary, to the obnoxiously self-important mythologizing of its central figures, to the liberal twisting of the timeline to suit narrative contrivances, which there is a lot of as the film goes into its final act.
However, what I found most insulting was the way the film lets down Freddie Mercury. The fact that the film never seems to dive into the other band members, Brian May (Gwilym Lee), Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy), John Deacon (Joseph Mazzello) is forgivable since we’re obviously all here for insight into the genius of Mercury, yet the film seems to refuse to do so. I was always fascinated by Mercury, not just because he’s one of the all-time great performers, but because he was of Indian descent like me, and I found his public connection – or lack thereof – to his Indian-Parsi culture to be interesting. Casting someone who isn’t Indian is disappointing, but I suppose it’s better than whitewashing (since Malik comes from an Egyptian background). In the film, we’re introduced to his family, and we see that he has some slight animosity towards his father, and he even experiences some prejudice when other men refer to him as “paki,” a common anti-brown slang in the UK. However, we never get any insight as to what any of this means to him, how it makes him feel, why does he want to distance himself from his culture, why did he change his name (which was originally Farrokh Bulsara), what is going on in that head of his? The film never answers or even implies anything from these questions. Even a moment that offers closure with his father in the end comes out of nowhere because the film never brings up what the issue between them really was. This would’ve been a cool opportunity to explore a complicated brown figure in the mainstream in a way that hasn’t been done before, and I was very disappointed that the film showed little interest.
Then there’s also the way the film treats his sexual identity. Despite the film being directed by a gay man, the film is weirdly judgy of Mercury and his antics. You know how a lot of film shows the downward spiral of a rockstar – or any other type of entertainer – through drugs or alcoholism, and he/she gets worse as the film goes along? That’s how this film frames Mercury when he leans on his queerness. Mercury enters a gay club, and it’s lit like he’s going somewhere dangerous and sleazy, his parties and friends are shown to be a bad influence, but only in relation to how it affects the band as opposed to Mercury on a personal level, the film has this odd, implied message that if he only stuck with his lady friend, Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton) then none of the bad stuff would’ve happened, which opens a huge can of worms. The film is full of moments where it goes out of its way to condemn Mercury and his actions without an ounce of empathy. It almost feels like a hit piece against Freddie Mercury by the remaining band members who want to have the last word.
The performances are all adequate. Like I mentioned earlier, none of the supporting characters are given much attention, and while most of that attention is given to Mercury, it’s still at the mercy of a script that lacks any nuance. Rami Malek hasn’t impressed me the way he has for others, but I can tell he’s trying here. He’s committed in ways the film isn’t, and the only reason he manages to make some impression here is because his character is the only one given some semblance of a personality, even if it doesn’t build into anything meaningful or emotionally resonant.
I try to keep full on pans to a minimum on this site because I made this to express and celebrate all the great things about film, but I don’t have a lot of great things to say about Bohemian Rhapsody at all. For a lot of the two hour and 14 minute runtime, I was either baffled by the painfully generic storytelling, disappointed by the lack of insight, or angry at the blatant lies and manipulation by the filmmakers. There is not a single genuine, human, or sincere moment in the entire film, and to say it’s paint-by-numbers would be a major understatement. I can appreciate Rami Malek’s effort, some of Newton Thomas Sigel’s flashy cinematography, John Ottman’s snappy editing, a rather fun cameo by Mike Myers, and the music, obviously, but once it’s all said and done, I got absolutely nothing out of it. Freddie Mercury deserves so much better than this.
And also, nothing on Queen doing the Flash Gordon songs? Boo! Boo, I say!