Bohemian Rhapsody has been such a trainwreck from the jump, eight years ago, that “bites the dust” headlines wrote themselves again and again. First there were the three years that Sacha Baron Cohen was attached to the role of Freddie Mercury; then there were the three years the surviving band members and the comedian spent sniping over that in the press. “Mr. Robot” star Rami Malek was eventually cast in the role, which brought legitimate excitement to the project—until the first trailer dropped back in May and concerns about the suspected straight-washing of Mercury arose. But even these missteps would quickly be swallowed up by all sorts of other controversies.
Bohemian Rhapsody’s original director, Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects, a handful of X-Men movies), was fired near the end of filming, allegedly because he stopped showing up and clashed with the cast and crew, notably Malek. He was then replaced by Dexter Fletcher, who remains uncredited as a director due to DGA rules (since Singer completed nearly all of the movie). But Singer should have never been hired in the first place: the filmmaker has long been known in Hollywood as having a penchant for young men—a sort of Kevin Spacey-esque open secret that hasn’t had its reckoning yet despite numerous allegations of assault and statutory rape against him. Two weeks ago, Singer took to Instagram to preemptively deny a yet-to-be-published Esquire exposé, which he attacked for “attempt[ing] to rehash false accusations” and coinciding with Bohemian Rhapsody’s release.
Knowing all this, it’s hard not to be repulsed watching the film’s portrayal of Mercury meeting his longtime lover Jim Hutton (Aaron McCusker) for the first time. Mercury, the famous man in a position of power, nonconsensually gropes Hutton, who is working a party thrown at the rock star’s home. Though there’s a brief moment when Hutton is offended and Mercury apologizes, this is quickly passed off as quirkily messy, albeit a bit forward; Mercury’s behavior is immediately rewarded. Research doesn’t reveal anything about this being their actual “meet-cute”—the two reportedly met at a gay club and Mercury asked Hutton if he “had a big cock.” Whether there’s some accuracy in Mercury’s initially inappropriate gesture as seen in Bohemian Rhapsody, the Singer-ian subtext is difficult to ignore. Pop culture has been grappling with how to approach problematic art with such fervency in recent years, it can be quite a relief when a film made by a questionable director is almost irredeemably bad.
The film also manages to rob Mercury of nearly all his queer pleasures. For those worried about the straight-washing of the singer or the erasure of his battle with AIDS, Bohemian Rhapsody does explicitly label him gay and diagnoses his cause of death. It’s just the portrayal of his gayness that’s troubling. Mercury was engaged to his hometown sweetheart Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton), who inspired one of the few romantic Queen anthems, “Love of My Life.” But with the band’s popularity rising, the film shows Mercury eyeing men on tour and flirting with Kenny Everett, the DJ who debuted “Bohemian Rhapsody” on the radio and played a big part in the song’s meteoric rise. Mercury eventually comes out to Mary as “bisexual,” when she suspects that their relationship is dwindling, but she immediately corrects him, saying, “you’re gay.” Mercury, in real life, dated both men and women after Mary. Though he never came out to the public, he was pretty openly bisexual in his love life. Instead, the film uses his partly fabricated, strictly homosexual reveal to create a schism in his and Mary’s relationship, and to take the blame for his debaucherous downfall. If this treatment of Mercury’s sexuality wasn’t bad enough, the movie also makes a boring, one-dimensional gay villain out of his manager, Paul Prenter (Allen Leech), who did eventually sell Mercury out, but still deserves a portrayal that’s not so over-simplified. At the very least make your gay villain interesting!
Malek, on the other hand, seems to be doing the best he possibly can, even with those ludicrous fake teeth (I swear, they’re a Muppet-like exaggeration of Freddie’s actual incisors, which in the film he credits for giving him that famous vocal range). The distracting nature of this makeup pushes Malek’s performance towards caricature, though he otherwise nails the strut, the flamboyance, the showmanship of a truly singular rock star. This was supposed to be Malek’s big, transformative, Oscar-worthy break away from television, but literally every aspect of the film wants to bring him down. Malek might still have a small awards-season shot, as he is one of two saving graces of this hot mess—the other one being Queen’s music itself, something the film can’t even take credit for.
When Bohemian Rhapsody does delve into the music (particularly the writing process), it feels like an abbreviated retelling from guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor, who had script and director approval. Sure, Queen was the rare band comprised of four strong songwriters, but according to the film, their biggest hits came together way too easily in the studio. May (Gwilym Lee) stomps his feet twice and claps on the third beat and voila, “We Will Rock You” is born. Bassist John Deacon (Joseph Mazzello) sits in a corner while his bandmates argue and randomly starts playing the iconic bass line of “Another One Bites the Dust” (in actuality, Deacon supposedly ripped off Chic after hanging with them in their studio); the bickering ends. And everyone seems so suspiciously onboard with Mercury’s anti-radio-friendly “Bohemian Rhapsody,” with the exception of a cartoonishly antagonistic record label exec, played by Mike Myers, who claims “Bohemian Rhapsody” would never become a hit. (The joke is very obviously on him.) May and Taylor’s participation as producers is a bit troubling; not only were they the reason Cohen quit the film (they reportedly wanted something focused more on the band than Freddie), we end up with a version of the Queen story that casts Mercury as the only diva of the quartet. Were the other three really so well behaved and then so patronizingly forgiving when their frontman apologetically crawls back after living out his supposedly friendship-ruining gay lifestyle? My god.
Even without all the problems attached to the production, Bohemian Rhapsody is not so much a film as it is a dramatization of a Wikipedia entry, watered down and overedited. Events in the film happen in trite succession without going anywhere interesting with the story’s peaks and valleys. There’s nothing special about the film, except maybe that it’s a masterclass in useless cutting (there are so many cuts in a single scene and showy match-cut transitions between scenes that it becomes a confoundingly fascinating watch in a way, like a disaster you can’t turn away from). I felt betrayed by my own tears when they welled up during the final climactic act—Queen’s historic Wembley Stadium set at Live Aid in 1985—but that’s strictly because hearing Queen’s music moves me. I refuse to give the film, with its cheesy CGI-rendering of such an iconic performance, credit for that. If Bohemian Rhapsody could even remotely be considered a tear-jerker, these should be tears of remorse over how a stunted vision did Queen, and especially Freddie Mercury, so dirty.
