A movie with a Queen soundtrack is automatically good.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” belongs to that relatively new subgenre of
movies, the musical biopic. These movies trace the life of a famous
musician with the help of a greatest hits soundtrack. This subgenre
has its pluses and minuses. The pluses are the guarantee of a
soundtrack that is composed of great songs, a must have in any good
movie musical, and an existing fan base that can guide the creators
to the important much loved milestones/controversies of the
musician’s life. The drawbacks is the inborn sense of
responsibility to the musician’s brand, which can gloss over
certain unsympathetic events (say the omission of multiple children
by multiple women in the movie Ray
while the musician was married) or act as an excuse to put the plot
of the movie on autopilot. There are great movies in this genre that
use the pluses and avoid the drawbacks. Ultimately they can do this
by not making the musician the hero of his story, but as a means to
explore deeper themes. Amadeus
has a Mozart soundtrack but is ostensibly about a less famous rival
of his, Salieri, and his envy. Very good movies like Get on
Up and The Doors do
not treat their musicians sympathetically at all and act more like
cautionary tales about fame and/or drugs. It is rare that a musical
biopic can have it both ways: an exception would be What’s
Love Got to Do With It, which
believably portrayed Tina Turner as the hero of her life without
provoking the usual cynicism.
Bohemian Rhapsody belongs to
the middle-of-the pack biopics that herald a great soundtrack, make
sure the fans get all the milestones/controversies they came to see,
but ultimately fails to connect the music with a unique story. This
movie follows an autopilot plot of early and unlikely success, large
success marred by egotism, a break-up, soul-searching and an ultimate
reunion for one last concert. You’ve seen this before. The music is
probably better this time, but that is because Queen is a special
band, not because the movie is a special movie.
Having said that, I enjoyed the
entirety of the movie. How could I not? They were playing Queen the
entire time and some of the cliché scenes were rendered enjoyable
simply by the truth of it all. Did a producer really drop Queen after
hearing their magnum opus album “A Night at the Opera” because he
did not like/understand “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Yes, apparently this
happened. The recluse Mike Myers drops in for a cameo scene as the
clueless producer in order to milk this scene for all its worth. When
the band exits the producer’s office they warn that the producer
will be always be remembered as the man who lost Queen. This
is the type of movie that has no qualms about unfairly utilizing
20/20 hindsight. Still its enjoyable because its true. What a dolt.
Bohemian Rhapsody may be
notable in that its autopilot plot noticeably avoids a take on
Freddie Mercury that would plausibly argue that he was a great figure
in a continuing cultural battle. Freddie Mercury was gay at a time
when he could not be open about it. However this biopic is not all
that concerned with any prejudice Freddie Mercury may have
encountered (his rift with his parents is much broader than sexuality
given that they are conservative Zoarastrians from Zimbabwe) and
portray him as a figure fighting for gay rights. In fact, his first
wife is glowingly portrayed while the character the movie decides to
make its villain is Freddie Mercury’s first gay lover and his
gateway into the homosexual lifestyle of the late 70s and early 80s.
It is there through debauched partying that Freddie contracts AIDS, a
truth that the movie does not describe in detail and does not ask the
audience to sympathize with in any particular way. The story ends
with the LiveAid concert for Africa wherein a healthy and robust
Freddie strutted and performed before an audience of one billion
people. His death a mere five years later is not shown. I wonder
whether had this movie been made ten or twenty years ago perhaps this
part of Freddie’s story would have had a more central importance to
the movie. Now that the cultural argument seems to have been all but
won in favor of homosexuality, perhaps we will see the argument
sidestepped more often and even more villains garbed in studded
leather jackets.
Freddie Mercury is played by Rami
Malek, a decent casting choice. Rami Malek and Freddie Mercury both
look vaguely foreign in the same unique way that it almost seems like
Bohemian Rhapsody was
a movie waiting for Rami Malek to become famous before it could get
made. Rami Malek does a fine job in performing Freddie moves on
stage. However, there is a slight problem here. Rami has to be about
five or six inches too short and it apparent in several scenes where
he is sharing a stage with other actors who should be the same height
or shorter than he is. It is possible to heighten an actor in a
movie. Steven Spielberg somehow plausibly grew Daniel Day-Lewis by
seven or eight inches to play Abraham Lincoln. Bohemian
Rhapsody fails to perform the
same magic with Rami Malek and this hurts his ability to project
Freddie Mercury’s stage presence. You can look at a YouTube video
of the LiveAid concert alongside the movie’s shot by shot
performance of the same concert and see what I mean. At the end of
the day, Rami Malek falls short of Freddie Mercury.
The director of this movie was Bryan
Singer (The Usual Suspects, X-Men)
who has done some very good movies in the past. Apparently he was
fired half-way through for allegations that have not been fully
revealed but seem connected to the #MeToo movement in a Kevin
Spacey-like way. Dexter Fletcher took over and made a safe mediocre
movie. I’m not sure what
Bryan Singer was doing, but I bet it wasn’t too much different than
the world that Freddie Mercury was apart of for awhile. A more
ambitious movie may have explored that a little further, but perhaps
we are not ready for that yet. It certainly wouldn’t fit the
operatic bouyant eminently entertaining music of Queen all that well.
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