Bryan Singer (2018)
This Freddie Mercury biopic has been in the works since 2010. Neither casting the leading role nor shooting the film turned out to be easy. First up to play Mercury was Sacha Baron Cohen, who might have managed the protagonist’s onstage showman side but struggled with his private vulnerability. Next was polar opposite Ben Whishaw: his emotional range certainly extends to mercurial though it’s harder to imagine him strutting his stuff at Wembley Stadium for the 1985 Live Aid concert that forms the prologue and climax to Bohemian Rhapsody. The final choice, Rami Malek, was cast as Freddie in late 2016 (presumably on the back of his success in the American TV drama Mr Robot). Filming got underway in autumn 2017: before it was completed, problems between the director Bryan Singer and members of the cast and crew led to Singer’s being fired and replaced by Dexter Fletcher, the original choice for the job, who had quit the project after falling out with the producers. (According to Directors Guild of America guidelines, Singer retains the director credit on the finished film. Fletcher is named as one of the executive producers.) Peter Morgan was hired to write the script but eventually forsook Queen for The Crown and Anthony McCarten (The Theory of Everything, Darkest Hour) took over. (Both get a screenplay credit.) The upshot of all this? The main man on camera does a better job than the main men behind it but you can’t help thinking the story of its gestation might have made a more gripping screen drama than Bohemian Rhapsody is.
It may or may not be as a result of the directing reins changing hands that some parts appear over-directed and others hardly directed at all. Singer-Fletcher (I’ll use the double-barrelled form for convenience) has a mania for reaction shots, particularly in scenes describing differences of opinion within Queen or between the foursome and record company management. The relentless switching from one face in close-up to another deprives these sequences of any rhythm. Rather than conducting conversations or discussions, the band members deliver statements (and speak in cliches). Much of what happens happens because it’s a requirement of the musical biopic form – for example, Freddie’s first meeting with Brian May (Gwilym Lee) and Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) on the very night that a vacancy for lead singer in their group comes up. Singer-Fletcher’s staging of Queen-specific moments is just as perfunctory. The invention of the ‘We Will Rock You’ beat – two stamps, one clap, one beat of silence – is presented so mechanically that you can’t believe this is really how it happened, even if it really was.
Opting for a Live Aid finale is doubly welcome – it avoids a description of Freddie’s physical decline and means that Rami Malek ends on a high – but the cross-cutting between the Wembley stage and minor characters watching in the stadium or on television is biopic boilerplate. The viewers include Freddie’s ex-fiancee Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton); his conservative but now tearfully proud parents (Ace Bhatti and Meneka Das); and the long-lost Jim Hutton (Aaron McCusker), whom Freddie took a liking to at a party years previously and whom he apparently tracks down again on the morning of the Live Aid concert. Even Ray Foster (Mike Myers), the cartoon EMI executive who parts company with Queen early in the film, reappears now to register how wrong he was to let them go.
I’d never realised before that Freddie Mercury wasn’t tall (1.77m): he’s such a powerful performer that he always seems big on a television screen. Rami Malek isn’t much shorter (1.75m) but he doesn’t, until Live Aid, transform on stage into a more imposing and invulnerable figure. Although Malek’s interpretation is never merely an impersonation of Mercury’s voice, movement and mannerisms, you rarely lose a sense of how hard he’s working to achieve these or that he seems uncomfortable with his prosthetic dentures. At Wembley, it’s different. The clever camera angles (the DP is Newton Thomas Sigel) enlarge Malek, who finally gets the chance here to perform more sizeable parts of the famous numbers. (He’s lip-syncing throughout to a vocal track that, according to NME, mixes Malek’s own voice with that of Marc Matel, ‘who has previously won huge plaudits for his inimitable takes of Queen on YouTube’.) Even though the huge crowd in the stadium is some way away, we also get our strongest impression at Wembley of Mercury’s appetite for engaging with a live audience. Malek’s stage strut is first rate and the fragility that he often suggests works for him in the closing stages. Freddie performs at Live Aid knowing that he is HIV-positive, although the Wikipedia entry for the film notes this as one of its several departures from the facts.
Bohemian Rhapsody is remarkably timid about Freddie Mercury’s sex life. On the evidence of what’s on screen, it’s hard to understand how he contracted AIDS as a result of promiscuity. Though Freddie lives with Mary Austin for a time, there’s not much evidence of their sleeping together. When his manager Paul Prenter (Allen Leech) first makes a pass at him, he resists. He pinches a male waiter’s bottom. At a petrol station, a truck driver en route to the gents gives him a funny (in both senses) look. That’s about it: you sometimes wonder if ‘Bohemian Celibacy’ wouldn’t be a better title for the movie. Mary is an assistant in a Biba shop, where she first meets Freddie. His personal and insouciant interest in the women’s clothes on sale is part of what intrigues her about him. But it seems they never get round even to discussing sexual unconventionality until he comes out to her as bisexual: Mary’s shocked reaction might be that of a chartered accountant’s wife in the 1970s – though she then tells Freddie he’s 100% gay.
The narrative blurs, to rather exasperating effect, distinctions between the hero’s private unease about his sexuality and the historically interesting pressure on a phenomenally successful rock band like Queen to avoid such a question. There’s little illustration of how the group’s other members reacted to Freddie’s sexual orientation. Paul Prenter has a monologue describing (credibly) how hard it was for him growing up gay in Northern Ireland. After granting him this favour, the script presents him as a merely nasty traitor: when he goes public on Freddie’s voracious sexual behaviour, there seems no good reason for the film’s audience to assume, as the 1980s tabloid press was eager to do, that Prenter is telling the truth.
Rami Malek is virtually the whole show but one watches Gwilym Lee sensing the presence of a good actor (as one also did in Midsomer Murders!). He’s the only cast member to suggest someone who exists beyond the moments when the camera is on him. Lee’s massive hairdo is more successful than the coiffure for Ben Hardy, stuck in a bad wig for the second film running (after Mary Shelley). The cast also includes Joe Mazzello as the other Queen member John Deacon and Tom Hollander as Jim Beach, the band’s lawyer-turned-manager. At the sound controls behind the Wembley stage, he still looks like a lawyer, in weekend casuals. Freddie’s cats are nice but there are too many reaction shots even of them.
The kid gloves attitude to the protagonist’s sexuality may be an expression of respect for his memory but is more obviously a commercial precaution. This has helped Bohemian Rhapsody to obtain a 12A BBFC certificate and a PG-13 MPAA rating: it’s thus a ‘family picture’ and already the highest-grossing musical biopic of all time, with worldwide box-office takings of around $541m (from a $50-55m budget) little more than a month after release. This only moderately entertaining movie vindicates the confidence of the people who made it in the vast size of the global Queen market. That confidence allows Singer-Fletcher to ride roughshod over considerations of storytelling clarity. Indications of the year in which events are occurring come and go inconsistently. The group are thrilled and astonished to get their first Top of the Pops slot but the ToTP bit that follows indicates that ‘Killer Queen’ is at number 2 so why the surprise? If you didn’t know beforehand, you might not even get from Bohemian Rhapsody whether the title track proved to be a hit or the commercial non-starter dismissed by Ray Foster. But everyone does know beforehand and those responsible for the film – including Brian May and Roger Taylor, who served as ‘creative and musical consultants’ – know that we know.
14 November 2018
