Summary
Is this the real life? Or is this just fantasy? A problematic biopic takes some liberties with history, skimming over some details and just making up other ones to fill in the gaps.
The story behind the making of BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY is almost as dramatic as the life of the band it depicts. Credited director Bryan Singer was fired weeks before the end of principal photography. Yet this is about the only thing that hasn’t been revised out of existence in this alternate history of a band called Queen.
In screenwriter Anthony McCarten’s version of events, a young Farrokh Bulsara, later known as Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek), is working as a baggage handler until he hooks up with musicians Brian May (Gwilym Lee), Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) and John Deacon (Joseph Mazello). Their unique sound takes them far against the odds. As Freddie struggles with his sexuality, he heads down a dark path of drugs and hubris while writing some of the greatest songs of the 20th century.
Filled with ‘…and that’s the origin of that‘ moments, McCarten and Singer don’t give anywhere near enough attention to the early career of the band, skimming over the first couple of albums to get to what they see as the good stuff. Opening and closing with the LiveAid concert, the ethical teachings of Mercury’s father clash with the hedonism of the rock lifestyle.
The problematic narrative wants to make Mercury the focus, but is caught in an attempt by the surviving members of the band trying to recast their place in history. Mercury’s homosexuality is treated as a dark moral path that he is led down by personal manager Paul Prenter (Allen Leech), presented here as a gay Mephistopheles who ultimately betrays Mercury. The odd approach is kind of like a Lifetime Movie of the Week in which the lead literally lip-syncs for his life.
While these dramatic liberties are par for the course in a biopic, the unapologetically fabricated back half of the film is baffling. Even Wikipedia is more accurate and detailed than this. Hemmed in by the LiveAid bookends, McCarten and Singer push Mercury’s AIDS diagnosis forward by 2 years in order to explain his vocal wobbles and give every song a sense of fated weight. To use this illness as a convenient plot point, especially when set at the height of the AIDS crisis, is not only biographically wrong but simply offensive.
The music, of course, is superb: but that’s hardly a surprise. You know the songs, and have probably butchered them in drunken karaoke before now. Rami Malek is terrific as Mercury, nailing the look and physical movement of the superstar. Lee similarly looks like he might actually be a time-travelling May, although it could just be the hair. The accomplished Lucy Boynton, as Mercury’s girlfriend Mary Austin, is wasted in a sidebar role.
The final 20 minutes or so is an almost beat-for-beat recreation of Queen’s performance at LiveAid, only skipping one song as the film finally gets concerned with fidelity. Despite the unintentionally funny shots of Bob Geldof (Dermot Murphy) pacing by the phone, this is where all the film’s energy sits. However, you’d be better off skipping this fan-fiction and pulling up the complete performance on YouTube and enjoying the real thing instead.
