Queen’s front man gets the Hollywood treatment
Bohemian Rhapsody, the new film about the English ’70’s and ’80’s supergroup Queen, is a lot like band’s output: overwrought, overproduced, painfully bombastic, and musically too self-conscious. But, like those songs we all know, the film has an undeniable energy and vibrancy, and is so technically consistent that one can’t help but feel satisfied, if a bit played.
Queen began and ended with Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Bulsara), and Bohemian Rhapsody does the same with Rami Malek. If the film is about anything other than establishing a mythology, it’s about luxuriating in the face, the teeth, the arched back, the strutting gate, and the piercing vocals of Malek’s spot-on portrayal of Mercury.
Directed originally by Bryan Singer (then by Dexter Fletcher after Singer was fired; the film’s tortured path to release could itself be a Queen song), the film’s basic plot is content to walk us down a well-worn genre path that begins with the teenaged Bulsara struggling against his strict Indian father (Ace Bhatti) and sympathetic but clueless mother (Meneka Das), breezily forming Queen with guitarist Brian May (a smoking hot Gwilym Lee) and drummer Roger Taylor (a boyish and buoyant Ben Hardy), rising quickly to stardom, battling a number of concomitant demons, enduring a breakup fueled by excesses and ego, then finding salvation (as well as a comeback of sorts) by performing at Live Aid in London.
Mercury’s homosexuality caused him great anxiety, especially with his band, and because he knew that the world was not ready to accept that Queen’s songs, with their required doses of sexual innuendos and erotic imagery, could have been sung by a gay man. The film predictably delves into this aspect of Freddie’s life by allowing his orientation to emerge gradually and surreptitiously, and downplays his excesses, until his diagnosis of AIDS forces a reckoning with his band, and sets the emotional stage for his triumphant Live Aid performance.
What’s puzzling is that though he’s in almost every shot, we never really get below the surface of understanding Mercury. We follow his every facial and body gesture, which maps nicely to all the accumulated video we’ve seen of him over the years. Rami Malek nails the physical aspects of Mercury — the way he walked almost like a model on a runway, or how his singing could start softly then quickly and smoothly move to a tightly controlled bellow — but Anthony McCarten’s script never gives us any insight into what made Mercury such a driven soul.
We’re forced to endure a doomed early marriage to Mary Austin (dutifully handled by Lucy Boynton), whom Mercury childishly idolizes to the point of jealousy over her new boyfriend, long after he’s come out and they’ve split up. We also must endure Mercury’s manipulation by, then emancipation from, a lover-turned-Svengali, Paul Prenter (played with creepy minimalism by Allen Leech), complete with a pouring-rain-at-night scene in which Mercury intones, “I want you out of my life …right away.” Pretty standard genre fodder.
What saves — and ultimately allows — the film to triumph are its handful of sequences that act as small origin myths to the band’s super suite of global uber hits. To anyone who knows the five or six biggest Queen hits (and really, at this point, who doesn’t?), it’s a delicious experience to be taken through how a kernel of a musical or lyrical idea blossomed over time (aided by lots of Hollywood romanticism) into “Another One Bites the Dust” or “We Will Rock You.”
The crown jewel, so-to-speak, of these, of course, is the song “Bohemian Rhapsody” itself. After a successful world tour in 1974, the band was ready to record again, and, in a scene that veers dangerously close to Spinal Tapdom, Queen pitches the song to EMI executive Ray Foster (played with a scary amount of understatement by none other than Mike Myers). That extended scene accomplishes more than most of the rest of the film combined. We bear witness to the birth of the song that Pitchfork many years later would call “a journey through a cappella choral music, singer-songwriter balladry, virtuoso guitar wizardry, full-on operatic bombast, ramrodding hard rock, and then a subtly unsettling variation of its introductory introspection.”
Yep… sounds about right.
The comedic contrast between Foster’s incredulity and Mercury’s absolute certainty is made all the sweeter because we all know what will happen to the song, and that it will forever change pop music. It’s a well-worn rock trope, but seeing it played out for laughs, as well as for history, works quite well. If that weren’t enough, we’re also treated to a very effective sequence involving the recording of the song’s “Galileo” vocals at the famed Rockfield Farm studios in 1975. Here, efficient but full-bodied filmmaking leave us dazzled at a bit of rock history being made, and offers a glimpse into what real band chemistry must feel like.
Bohemian Rhapsody unfortunately limits itself by stubbornly sticking to its simplistic story and archetypical rock characters, and it misses a number of opportunities to examine the phenomena not only of arena rock in the popular culture, but of how that was affected by queer culture, as well as questions around whether a band like Queen can ever again come to be. And yet, all this criticism instantly melts away when we see Brian May pivot his guitar skyward and launch into his solo for “We are the Champions.” Indeed, we ARE the champions, my friends…
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Bohemian Rhapsody opens today in Bay Area theaters.
