Bohemian Rhapsody ** (2018, Rami Malek, Lucy Boynton, Joseph Mazzello, Aiden Gillen, Allen Leech, Tom Hollander, Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy) – Movie Review

Bohemian Rhapsody is an interesting music biopic but it is troubled with hesitancies and uncertainties. Rami Malek proves a most interesting choice for the star part. He looks good and is ingratiating in the flamboyant role of Queen’s singer Freddie Mercury, but vocally (one of the film’s uncertainties) he is concentrating so hard on sounding English that it is straining his acting performance. When he is performing though, Malek is great.

That idea paves the way for the best part of the movie by far being Queen’s 1985 Live Aid concert performance re-created on a stage that is the largest set imaginable and with great CGI. It is thrilling, and so, of course, is Queen’s music, heard on a backing track despite the actors actually playing their instruments. Only on Another One Bites the Dust does the cast play and collaborate like a real band.

You never believe it is Freddie Mercury you are seeing in the way that Steve Coogan and John C Reilly trick you into convince you that you are seeing Laurel and Hardy in Stan & Ollie, or Helen Mirren in The Queen. Nevertheless, Malek is appealing and entertaining.

The main problem with Bohemian Rhapsody is, what is the story? It is just a clumsy, unwieldy series of and then, and thens, with real life frustratingly proving impossible to shape into an actual satisfying  story. It is just a series of vignettes, scenes from a life, with the screenplay dashing about wildly from one moment in time to the next. It never really settles or concentrates or focuses, except at the end for the Live Aid concert. This does tend to send you home in a good, foot-stomping mood, but it does not mean it is a particularly good film.

And then again, is this the real life, or is it just fantasy? How accurate is the storytelling? How accurate is the story? What is the purpose of telling the story, the motive behind the film? Surely it is more than just to make money. If the band’s guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor, the film’s producers, wanted the film to focus on the other members and not to be only be a biopic of Freddie Mercury, that isn’t really how it has turned out. It is a biopic of Freddie Mercury, with the other band members as shadowy background characters, just supporting players in the Mercury/ Malik show. This might be because Malik is so showy, or just because Mercury was.

Brian May and Rami Malek promoting Bohemian Rhapsody (2018).

If the trailer faced heavy backlash for the lack of portrayal of Mercury’s sexuality, that reflects the film. Concentrating on Freddie’s relationship with Mary Austin, ‘love of my life’, really heterosexualises the Freddie story and the film, no doubt in search of a wider audience. But surely that gives the wrong impression. Freddie’s love story with Mary Austin is quite dull too, as told here. Aaron McCusker gets much less screen time as Freddie’s boyfriend Jim Hutton, and their story is briefly and unsatisfyingly told.

Lucy Boynton, Aiden Gillen and Allen Leech have the rough end of things as Mary Austin, record company man John Reid and band manager Paul Prenter. Tom Hollander gives the best support performance as the lawyer Jim Beach, who becomes the manager when Freddie sacks Prenter.

Then again, Freddie doesn’t come over as a very nice individual, being quite damaged and wracked with uncertainties on the one hand and vain and arrogant on the other. He mostly seems like hard work, and rarely seems much fun, so the film rarely seems much fun either. The band members meantime seem just nice ordinary normal blokes, so that when Freddie betrays them to go solo, which he has earlier sacked John Reid for suggesting, he just seems like a disloyal twit. His eating humble pie to get back together to play Live Aid produces the best drama scene in the movie, but again hardly shows Freddie as a nice guy. He seems to be doing it just to get his career back after a failed solo effort in Germany.

Nevertheless, Bohemian Rhapsody provides plenty of food for thought, apparently, and yes, plenty of foot stomping moments.

With two weeks of filming and all of post-production still remaining, director Bryan Singer was fired by 20th Century Fox on 5 December 2017 and replaced by Dexter Fletcher allegedly after latenesses and absences of the director. Though Fletcher directed 16 days of filming and oversaw post-production, the Director’s Guild of America deemed the sole credit for directing the movie belonged to Singer.

Original choice to play Freddie Mercury, Sacha Baron Cohen, left the project because of creative differences with the band’s guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor, the film’s producers, played by Gwilym Lee and Ben Hardy, with Joseph Mazzello as John Deacon.

Bohemian Rhapsody proved to be the big winner of Oscar night, taking home four awards including best actor for star Rami Malek, best film editing for John Ottman, best sound mixing and best sound editing.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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