Director: Bryan Singer, 2010 (PG-13)
Bohemian Rhapsody opens July 13, 1985 with Freddie Mercury about to go on stage at LiveAid. But then it cuts back to 1970 and the movie moves inexorably to Queen’s 20 minute mini-concert that changed music forever.
The film begins with an unknown Indian Parsi college student, Farrokh Bulsara, handling baggage at Heathrow. With bad teeth and small frame, he is just a poor boy from a poor family. His dad just wants him to knuckle down and become British, slaving away. But he sees no escape from reality. Until he decides he could be the new lead singer for a student rock band called Smile. Once they change their name to Queen, the poor boy is transformed. No longer Farrokh, he is Freddie Mercury, the flamboyant and energetic performer at the front of the band.
Like most biopics, Bohemian Rhapsodyrelies on the performance of the actor. Here, Rami Malek (Mr Robot, The Master) delivers an astonishing performance to inhabit the role of Freddie. Like Gary Oldman in last year’s The Darkest Hour, Malek surely deserves a best actor nomination if not the award itself.
Queen’s success on the road parallels Freddie’s descent into drink and drugs and homosexuality. Bohemian Rhapsody does not delve too deeply into this side of Mercury’s life. It stays on the surface. We see brief shots of dark homo-erotic nightclubs, but nothing explicit. There is only enough to feel the need and desire of Freddie for something he was lacking. What he couldn’t find in his fiancée Mary (Lucy Boynton, Sing Street), he never found in his long-time personal manager and lover, Paul (Allen Leech, Tom Branson in Downton Abbey). As Jim, Freddie’s later partner declares, “Come and find me when you decide to like yourself.”
Three songs and two scenes really stand out for me. The first song is “Somebody to Love”. This song seems to characterize Mercury. He needs a friend and a lover, and goes through most of the film and life searching in vain, in all the wrong places. Toward the end, when he has left Queen to go solo, he is living in Munich with Paul. Orgies are the daily norm until Mary comes back. We all need somebody to love. We all need friends. Sycophants may surround us, but they do not support us. Freddie found this out the hard way.
The second song is “Who Wants to Live Forever”. In the film, Freddie sings this in a poignant moment after he knows he has AIDS and before he is ready to perform at LiveAid. He clearly does want more time. We probably all do. Most people, if honest with themselves, want somebody to love and want to live forever. Jesus is that somebody and he has offered us the way to live forever (Jn. 14:6). We can live forever with him through him and his sacrifice (Jn. 3:16).
The two scenes are matching bookends. One occurs early in the film. A long-haired Farrokh stands up to his father, nose-to-nose, and says sarcastically of working hard to be a success in Britain, “How’d it work out for you?” But at the end, a wiser, shorter-haired Freddie stands up to his dad, pulls him into an embrace and says, “Good thoughts, good words, good deeds,” a Zoroastrian family maxim. He has come home. He recognizes the value of family when time is short. He leaves his family in tears. And this scene left me in tears. Family is fundamental. To Freddie, Queen was family.
The final song is the eponymous “Bohemian Rhapsody”. At over six minutes, without a chorus, and a mashup of six genres, EMI refused to release it as a single. When it did come out, it was panned by critics almost unanimously. Yet it became a commercial success. It rode the UK charts to number one and stayed there for nine weeks. Following Mercury’s death, it was rereleased in 1991, it spent another 5 weeks in the number one spot. It eventually became the third-best selling UK single of all time. The film spends some time highlighting the efforts the band put in to record this operatic rock song and the passion they felt about it. In one scene, they implore Ray Foster (Mike Myers), the EMI record producer, to release it as the single from their “Night at the Opera” album. But he says the song is too long for radio and is not one that “teenagers can crank up the volume in their car and bang their heads to", clearly a reference to the iconic scene in Myer’s epic movie Wayne’s Worldwhere indeed they are head-banging to Bohemian Rhapsody. This song, written in 1975, has stood the test of time as a rock classic, and is a favorite go-to for many a karaoke-singer, including at least one of my kids.
The climax, of course, as pointed out above, is the LiveAid set. Queen was among more than 75 acts to perform. All the big rock bands of the 70s were scheduled for this 16 hour concert. The English version was at a packed out Wembley Stadium but televised around the world to more than 1 billion viewers. The moment Freddie and the band go on stage, the atmosphere becomes electric. And Freddie commands the audience in a performance that stole the show and has been called the best live performance ever. The film matches the concert set almost to the tee. Side-by-side comparisons of Malek’s Freddie with the real thing are almost indistinguishable. Although Malek is not really singing. While he sand some parts, the producers inserted vocal stems from Queen as well as filled in with a Canadian vocalist. This notwithstanding, the concert pulled the audience in, as Queen often did, with a mixup of six songs, starting with a raw version of Bohemian Rhapsody. They closed with two anthems, “We Will Rock You” and “We are the Champions”, songs designed and written to bring the audience in, to have them participate and feel part of the Queen family. What songs they were.
LiveAid raised more than $125 million in famine relief for Ethopia. For Queen, it gave them a world stage again and resurrected their career. Having stolen the show, they were given a world tour, their final, with 26 shows, including two at Wembley. A fitting finale.
Hollywood loves a homosexual film, such as Brokeback Mountain, Moonlight, Call Me by Your Name. But mark me, Bohemian Rhapsody is not a homosexual film. It is simply a story of a man caught up in his sexuality wanting love. He found success as perhaps the ultimate performer, but spent too many years without true love. Is this the real life, is this just fantasy? For Freddie, real life and real love found him at the end. In the form of Jim Hutton If you like Queen’s songs, you will love this film.
(C) Martin Baggs, 2018
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