Bohemian Rhapsody is just not a good movie, no matter what the Hollywood Foreign Press wants to tell you, and it’s hardly a surprise given the movie’s tortuous route to the screen, with multiple writers, a director dismissed from the project due to harassment allegations, and the three living members of Queen holding veto power over portions of the script. The film tries to tell the story of the band Queen and the story of Freddie Mercury, either of which would have filled an entire two hours on its own, and then somehow devolves into the (inaccurate) story of how the band ended up staging the best show at Live Aid, which, had they committed to it from the start, would have been a better movie than this pablum.
Queen were worldwide rock stars for more than fifteen years, from when Freddie Mercury, who was born Farrokh Bulsara to Parsi parents in Zanzibar, joined the band in 1971 until his death from AIDS-related pneumonia in 1991. Mercury was a flamboyant personality who dressed in androgynous fashion and had an electric stage presence as well as a potent voice with a four-octave range, and was the subject of longstanding rumors about his sexual orientation (at a time of rampant homophobia) and, later, about his health (when fear of AIDS was a polite form of homophobia). He had a difficult and, by some accounts, unhappy personal life, with his twenty-year friendship with Mary Austin, to whom he was once engaged, one of the few highlights, with him calling her his “only friend” in a 1985 documentary.
Bohemian Rhapsody glosses over most of the important stuff and tells a sanitized linear story that is light on the facts but avoids painting any of the three surviving band members in any sort of negative light, and presents a two-dimensional portrait of Mercury that makes him by turns pathetic and bland. You can find plenty of breakdowns of the film’s loose relationship with the truth, but that’s hardly its biggest flaw. This is a bunch of well-shot concert scenes stitched together by snippets of dull back story, most of which shows the band making music (not really great cinema, gents) or the three musicians getting mad at Freddy for being late. Much of the first 110 minutes seems to be prologue for the Live Aid scene, which the film attempts to re-create shot for shot, and which is undoubtedly the best part of the film – indeed, had they just shown me those 20 minutes, and skipped everything that came before, I would have been far more satisfied with the experience. (Also, there was popcorn.)
Much of the writing in Bohemian Rhapsody is just plain lazy. The band didn’t break up before Live Aid, but the script has them do so to raise the stakes for the show as a reunion and give us a rather silly scene in their lawyer’s office. There’s a Wayne’s World reference that is groan-worthy and lazy AF, and of course it features Mike Myers in a bit of stunt-casting as a record executive who never existed. There are speeches and soliloquys galore, most of which I have to assume never happened because they’re so ridiculous. There’s a Rasputin-like character Paul, who was a real person, but is exaggerated to be the bad guy who drives the wedge between Freddie and the band and is dispensed with once his role as the villain is done. (He’s played by Allen Leach, so the whole time I’m thinking, that’s Branson with a porn stache.)
The movie’s worst sin is how it straightwashes so much of Mercury’s sexuality and, eventually, how he was sick for the last five years of his life and died of AIDS-related pneumonia. The movie shows him telling his bandmates “I’ve got it,” referring to the disease, before Live Aid, but all accounts have him unaware he was sick until at least a full year later, and he didn’t tell the other members of Queen until 1989. It depicts Mary Austin as his only female lover, which isn’t accurate, and then has her largely out of his life between the end of their engagement and the run-up to Live Aid, which also isn’t accurate – she worked for his private music publishing company. (Apparently the scene where he confesses he thinks he’s bisexual and she responds by saying she thinks he’s gay is accurate, at least according to Austin.) Mercury came off in many interviews as unhappy, and exploring why – perhaps as the gay son of a Zoroastrian couple, whom he never told about his orientation, who was self-conscious about his appearance and ethnicity as well, he had issues with identity and self-acceptance. The film just doesn’t bother with this material.
Rami Malek won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama for this performance, which is a good effort but ultimately, like so much in the film, an extended impersonation because the character is so underdeveloped. Still, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voters love impersonations too – they gave Gary Oldman the same fucking award last year for doing nothing more than donning a fat suit and mumbling his way through Darkest Hour — and it wouldn’t surprise me to see Malek get the same here, although if he defeats Bradley Cooper, Christian Bale, and Ethan Hawke it would be a damn shame, to say nothing of Stephan James or Joaquin Phoenix, neither of whom is likely to even get a nomination. As for Best Picture, I suppose anything is possible, but even considering the Academy’s disdain for foreign films in that category, I could give you two dozen better American films from 2018 without much effort. Giving this a nod over First Man, which is right behind it on Gold Derby’s odds page, would be criminal. It’s barely worth your time if you love Queen’s music, and you have to sit through so much nonsense to get to that stuff I wouldn’t even suggest you waste the gas money.