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"The Show Must Go On": Bohemian Rhapsody
Nov. 5th, 2018 01:25 pmAs huge Queen fans, my family has been waiting for this movie for over two years.
We read about all the troubles leading in, about Sasha Baron Cohen, and Brian Singer losing his mind and going AWOL, and is Rami Malek really going to sing? (answer: no), and all the questions about how the movie would handle Freddie Mercury's sexuality, and it just seemed to go on forever. We didn't care, not really. We just wanted to see Freddie and the boys (or a reasonable facsimile) go up on the screen and rip it up.
We got what we wanted.
But not without a few problems.
The biggest problem with the movie is that, even before all the production difficulties cropped up, the finished product was always going to be an awkward fusion of two parallel stories: the story of Queen (the band) and the private life of Freddie Mercury. As the executive producers and the driving engines behind the movie, Queen guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor were resolute to keep the focus on the band. But even May and Taylor must have known that their movie studio partners (Fox, in this case) would want to play up Freddie's spectacular personal life.
So, for too much of the run time, the movie is neither fish nor fowl: not enough time to dig into the band's creative process, how four very talented musicians with very different personalities combined to create something unique in popular music; and definitely not enough time to explore all the facets of Freddie Mercury's complex and contradictory personality.
The two movies kind of alternate, almost competing with each other, held together by undigested chunks of rock bio cliche: You have the Disapproving Parents, the Big Break, the Tour Montages (with names of cities zooming past us on the screen), the Big Split (Brian actually says "You broke up Queen!") and the Big Show to close it out. (There's also a more unpleasant side effect to this divided approach that I'll get to in a minute.)
And yet, and yet.... there is some incredibly good material here, clever and funny, worthy of its subjects. The section detailing the creation of "Bohemian Rhapsody" (and the "Night at the Opera" album) is damn near perfect. We see: Queen lay out their plans for the album and their musical manifesto to a skeptical record exec (played by Mike Myers, leveraging his status as Queen's #1 celebrity superfan to maximum ironic effect); the other members struggling to hit the operatic high notes that Freddie hears in his head; Brian's sweet guitar solo; the battle over whether the song should be released as a single; and best of all, a rapid-fire series of reviews of the song, as critics lambaste Freddie's epic as pretentious drivel.
What do they know? Queen, whatever their personal differences, almost always got the music right. The movie, as you might expect, gets it right too. The concert performances are electric, culminating in a brilliant recreation of Queen's triumphant set at 1985's Live Aid concert. Rami Malek has Freddie Mercury's moves down cold; he swings a mike stand and does a rock god strut better than most real rock gods.
Malek, in general, delivers even when the screenplay fails him. He captures Freddie's confidence on stage and in the studio, contrasting with his deep loneliness and insecurity everywhere else. There is one great scene where Freddie is confronted by his fiancee, Mary Austin (well-played by Lucy Boynton) about whether their relationship is a lie. Freddie struggles to tell her she means everything to him even if he's discovering he prefers men as sexual partners, while she's just tired of being cast off by men she cares about. The whole scene is counterpointed by the ballad he wrote for her, "Love of My Life", playing on the television as they fight. A rare, effective merging of the musical and personal storylines.
Much, much less effective are the scenes of Freddie exploring that sexuality. When the movie gets to the early 1980s and a montage of Freddie's dive into the club scene (set to the throbbing bass pulse of John Deacon's "Another One Bites the Dust"), Freddie's expression is somber and dimly lit, and the atmosphere feels dark and ominous. There was the hint of... maybe not "gay bashing", but a wagging finger of disapproval from May and Taylor, that maybe if Freddie wasn't so busy fucking around and concentrated on the music (Dammit!) there wouldn't be any problems.
Well, I call bullshit on that.
For one thing, the other guys indulged in just as much rock and roll excess as Freddie, and I don't see them getting judged for it. For another thing, Freddie met Jim Hutton--his life partner until his death--in one of those clubs. And it's here that I miss Freddie's viewpoint in this movie, and how he would have felt about his portrayal. (Would he have told his band mates they were full of crap, and they took all the joy out of his life story?)
But we don't have Freddie here. And even if we did, I don't know if he would have participated in this movie. For all his flamboyance and exhibitionism on stage, he was an intensely private person, reluctant to share even the tiniest bit of information about his private life. Anything we know about him comes from lovers, band mates, managers--the internal life of the man born Farrokh Bulsara is a guess. Maybe any movie about Freddie Mercury will be incomplete, and we should just be grateful to have his music.
We read about all the troubles leading in, about Sasha Baron Cohen, and Brian Singer losing his mind and going AWOL, and is Rami Malek really going to sing? (answer: no), and all the questions about how the movie would handle Freddie Mercury's sexuality, and it just seemed to go on forever. We didn't care, not really. We just wanted to see Freddie and the boys (or a reasonable facsimile) go up on the screen and rip it up.
We got what we wanted.
But not without a few problems.
The biggest problem with the movie is that, even before all the production difficulties cropped up, the finished product was always going to be an awkward fusion of two parallel stories: the story of Queen (the band) and the private life of Freddie Mercury. As the executive producers and the driving engines behind the movie, Queen guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor were resolute to keep the focus on the band. But even May and Taylor must have known that their movie studio partners (Fox, in this case) would want to play up Freddie's spectacular personal life.
So, for too much of the run time, the movie is neither fish nor fowl: not enough time to dig into the band's creative process, how four very talented musicians with very different personalities combined to create something unique in popular music; and definitely not enough time to explore all the facets of Freddie Mercury's complex and contradictory personality.
The two movies kind of alternate, almost competing with each other, held together by undigested chunks of rock bio cliche: You have the Disapproving Parents, the Big Break, the Tour Montages (with names of cities zooming past us on the screen), the Big Split (Brian actually says "You broke up Queen!") and the Big Show to close it out. (There's also a more unpleasant side effect to this divided approach that I'll get to in a minute.)
And yet, and yet.... there is some incredibly good material here, clever and funny, worthy of its subjects. The section detailing the creation of "Bohemian Rhapsody" (and the "Night at the Opera" album) is damn near perfect. We see: Queen lay out their plans for the album and their musical manifesto to a skeptical record exec (played by Mike Myers, leveraging his status as Queen's #1 celebrity superfan to maximum ironic effect); the other members struggling to hit the operatic high notes that Freddie hears in his head; Brian's sweet guitar solo; the battle over whether the song should be released as a single; and best of all, a rapid-fire series of reviews of the song, as critics lambaste Freddie's epic as pretentious drivel.
What do they know? Queen, whatever their personal differences, almost always got the music right. The movie, as you might expect, gets it right too. The concert performances are electric, culminating in a brilliant recreation of Queen's triumphant set at 1985's Live Aid concert. Rami Malek has Freddie Mercury's moves down cold; he swings a mike stand and does a rock god strut better than most real rock gods.
Malek, in general, delivers even when the screenplay fails him. He captures Freddie's confidence on stage and in the studio, contrasting with his deep loneliness and insecurity everywhere else. There is one great scene where Freddie is confronted by his fiancee, Mary Austin (well-played by Lucy Boynton) about whether their relationship is a lie. Freddie struggles to tell her she means everything to him even if he's discovering he prefers men as sexual partners, while she's just tired of being cast off by men she cares about. The whole scene is counterpointed by the ballad he wrote for her, "Love of My Life", playing on the television as they fight. A rare, effective merging of the musical and personal storylines.
Much, much less effective are the scenes of Freddie exploring that sexuality. When the movie gets to the early 1980s and a montage of Freddie's dive into the club scene (set to the throbbing bass pulse of John Deacon's "Another One Bites the Dust"), Freddie's expression is somber and dimly lit, and the atmosphere feels dark and ominous. There was the hint of... maybe not "gay bashing", but a wagging finger of disapproval from May and Taylor, that maybe if Freddie wasn't so busy fucking around and concentrated on the music (Dammit!) there wouldn't be any problems.
Well, I call bullshit on that.
For one thing, the other guys indulged in just as much rock and roll excess as Freddie, and I don't see them getting judged for it. For another thing, Freddie met Jim Hutton--his life partner until his death--in one of those clubs. And it's here that I miss Freddie's viewpoint in this movie, and how he would have felt about his portrayal. (Would he have told his band mates they were full of crap, and they took all the joy out of his life story?)
But we don't have Freddie here. And even if we did, I don't know if he would have participated in this movie. For all his flamboyance and exhibitionism on stage, he was an intensely private person, reluctant to share even the tiniest bit of information about his private life. Anything we know about him comes from lovers, band mates, managers--the internal life of the man born Farrokh Bulsara is a guess. Maybe any movie about Freddie Mercury will be incomplete, and we should just be grateful to have his music.
