‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ Review: Killer Queen for the whole family…

ABOVE: Rami Malek plays Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody.

“Bohemian Rhapsody,” the song by Queen, lasts nearly six minutes, a very long time for a pop single back in 1975. A baroque blend of gibberish, mysticism and melodrama, the track is a musical masterstroke that gets into your head whether you like it or not and will stay there forever.

There’s probably some rock star out there whose life could only result in a fantastic, tasteful family PG biopic. But it takes a certain degree of, um, talent to make a movie about Freddie Mercury, one of the least drab humans who ever lived, and leave out a whole bunch of juicy truths.

And here it is…

But, let’s not forget, the movie has been dogged by problems for years on end. Sacha Baron Cohen (a performance of which we can but dream), wanted a darker, grittier true life-inspired detailed film about the famous frontman, but the surviving band members didn’t play ball like adorable, playful kittens.

Bryan Singer was by all accounts an unprofessional terror to work with, failing to show up, getting into fights with his actors, and at one point hurling a piece electrical equipment on set, though Fox executives somehow deemed that incident “not actionable.” Eventually, after asking to pause production for several weeks, Singer was fired from the film with a few weeks left to shoot, and Dexter Fletcher finished it, (unfortunately though because of the director’s guild rules), Singer is still its sole credited director.

ABOVE: Queen’s hits were always about sound and sensation.

Opening and closing with Queen’s triumphant performance at Live Aid in 1985, the film shows (sort of) the transformation of shy buck-toothed Farrokh Bulsara, the closeted son of Parsis parents, into the strutting swaggering Freddie Mercury.

Freddie’s sometimes difficult relationship with his conservative Indian Parsi family forms one axis of the plot. (His stern father is played by Ace Bhatti, his doting mother by Meneka Das.)

Freddie is shown approaching a band he likes backstage at a club in London. They just lost their lead singer, and Mercury has written a song he wants to show them. Next thing you know, he makes his debut with them, and, except for one catcall of “Paki,” Freddie and his flamboyant movements goes over really well. He falls in love with Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton) who plays Freddie’s soulmate and life love with great determination and pride.

Next thing you know, they’re Queen, and they’re touring the darn world.

The boys have a manager, a contract, an album, and a cascade of wealth.

It’s that easy.

As for their first global tour, it is illustrated by the names of cities flashing up on the screen—“Tokyo,” “Rio,” and so forth, in one of those excitable montages which were starting to seem old-fashioned by 1940.

Touring also bring pain, and Freddie it seems, in this retelling has lots of pain and regrets.

The script makes it seem like Mercury had no desires for homosexual sex until Paul Prenter (Allen Leech, we’re guessing he’ll receive a lot of hate mail in his post box sooner or later), came along and showed him the way.

Paul (real Paul, not actor, Allen Leech, Downton Abbey” fame) is, manipulative, cunning, controlling, lures Mercury into the gay underworld of leather clubs and orgies, far away from the goodness, the wholesomeness, that is the rest of Queen.

In real life, Prenter—who also died of AIDS in 1991—eventually gave very damaging interviews following his breakup with Mercury. But “Bohemian Rhapsody” shows no interest in contextualizing what Paul, a self-described “queer Catholic boy from North Belfast,” may have represented to the closeted Mercury, and why Freddie was drawn to him.

“Bohemian Rhapsody,” the movie about Queen, lasts more than two hours, not a very long time by modern feature standards, even though it feels somewhat interminable in parts. 

None of this is the fault of Rami Malek. He taps into Mercury’s ferocious energy, particularly in the concert sequences, and does his best in the biopic of the film, in which he plays Mercury with aplomb, prominent buck teeth, and an occasional wavering accent. (He does sing at times, too, but most of Mercury’s performances are an amalgamation of Queen recordings. It’s more of an impression than a performance, but it’s big enough that everything else gets pushed out when he’s onscreen.

Welcome, young ones: Rami Malek, Ben Hardy, Joe Mazzello, and Gwilym Lee as Queen in Bohemian Rhapsody. Alex Bailey/20th Century Fox

SCREENWRITING DUTIES:

The screenwriter (Anthony McCarten, who wrote “Darkest Hour” and “The Theory of Everything”) pulls out a fabulous script. But the overall narrative architecture of “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a palace of clichés. It lacks that certain spark which will make this film truly a great many years down the line.

WE KNOW YOU?

The artistic commentary in “Bohemian Rhapsody” tends towards a knowing wink-wink at the audience. “Nobody wants to listen to a six-minute opera song with words like ‘Galileo’ in it!,” cries one record label executive (played by Mike Myers, cosmetic-to-the-hilt in a bit of meta-casting, calling up the “Bohemian Rhapsody” scene in “Wayne’s World.”)

CONCLUSION:

Though some fans of Queen will still find something to love about Bohemian Rhapsody — the recreation of the band’s 1985 Live Aid performance at the end of the movie, in particular, delivers some much-needed highs — the way the script scrambles some aspects of Mercury’s career like eggs in a pan, while seeming strangely ashamed of his personal life may be enough to ruin it for others.

The main point, the attitude toward Mercury’s sexual expression. The tensions of being a gay man in the 1970s are not handled, or even addressed. He himself seems unaware of his own sexual desires and looks shocked and disturbed when a trucker gives him a seductive side-eye at a restroom in middle America. (Fade to black. We never see what happened next.) There’s no other word for this approach than phobic. The relationship with Mary was hugely important to Mercury (he left his estate to her in his will), but the subtleties of the situation and the context of what it would mean to “come out” in the 1970s are not explored at all.

Culturedemandsgeeks imagined the surviving members of the band wanted a PG friendly, family movie, and that’s what we have here, (with occasional sloppy storytelling thrown in as a side-order) but overall, with the music beats, the effort from talented Rami Malek, the film shows real passion for Legendary Queen frontman, Freddie Mercury.

STARS: 4/5