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Freddie Mercury, the legendary lead singer of Queen and the greatest frontman of all time, is depicted in a scene in “Bohemian Rhapsody” that I keep returning to because it is symbolic of the film’s problems, not only with its portrayal of Queen, but also with its portrayal of Freddie Mercury. (I’d say “arguably,” but there isn’t any debate in my mind.) Freddie Mercury (a magnificent Rami Malek) throws a costume ball in his mansion one night to make up for the excitement of touring that he has missed. He swings through the crowd, which is made up of men dressed in varying degrees of fabulous drag. He is dressed in an ermine cloak and a crown. In the audience, the other members of Queen—lead guitarist Brian May (Gwilym Lee), drummer Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy), and bassist John Deacon (Joseph Mazzello)—are visibly uncomfortable as they sit together. “This isn’t really our scene, Freddie,” one of them says stiffly as Freddie greets them enthusiastically. Later that night, Freddie has a sexual encounter with a waiter named Jim (Aaron McCusker), who rejects him and tells him, “Call me when you feel like you.”
Angrier I become the more I think about this scene, which has so many problems that they could fill an entire dissertation on their own. “Freddie Mercury’s costume ball scene in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” written by Anthony McCarten (“The Theory of Everything,” “Darkest Hour”) and directed by Bryan Singer (with uncredited director Dexter Fletcher, who took over after Singer was fired), is designed to make me think, “Wow, I’m scared for Freddie.” Freddie requires the stability of his (married, straight) band members in order to survive in the SUPER gay world in which he finds himself.” I had a hard time with this scene, and I tried to be fair to the filmmakers by giving them the benefit of the doubt. However, what is displayed on the screen is exactly what is intended. We are supposed to sympathize with the members of the band, and we are supposed to look at Freddie with the same displeasure that they do because he is acting so, well, gay. It’s completely unforgivable.
The film begins and ends with Queen’s triumphant performance at Live Aid in 1985, and it depicts (sort of) the transformation of shy buck-toothed Farrokh Bulsara, the closeted son of Parsi parents, into the strutting swaggering Freddie Mercury over the course of the performance. Backstage at a London nightclub, Freddie is seen approaching a band that he enjoys listening to. They have recently lost their lead singer, and Mercury has written a song that he would like to perform for them. He makes his debut with them the next day, and, aside from one “Paki” catcall, Freddie and his flamboyant movements are received extremely positively. The next thing you know, they’re on the road with Queen, performing all over the world. As stated in the film, their artistic journey can be summarized in one or two on-the-nose statements such as, “We’re going to mix genres and cross boundaries!” Is this how rock stars communicate? The origins of some of their most famous songs—”Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Another One Bites the Dust,” and “We Will Rock You”—are treated in a cursory manner, with little insight provided into the actual creative process itself.
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Biopics have a tendency to be “sensational,” with some making the mistake of believing that the most interesting thing about James Brown, for example, is his personal life, when the reason we care about James Brown is because of his music. It was far more interested in Hank Williams’ drug addiction than it was in what he actually accomplished in country music that was so groundbreaking. Some films, such as “Love & Mercy” and “I’m Not There,” veer away from the biopic format entirely, attempting to grapple with the subject matter as artists rather than as subjects. The artistic commentary in “Bohemian Rhapsody” tends to be a knowing wink-wink at the audience, as in the case of the Queen song. Nobody wants to sit through a six-minute opera song with words like ‘Galileo’ in it!,” cries one record label executive (played by Mike Myers in a bit of meta-casting, referencing the “Bohemian Rhapsody” scene from “Wayne’s World.”)
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When it comes to biopics, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is bad in the same way that a lot of them are bad: it’s superficial, it avoids complexity, and it has a “connect the dots” feel to it. This type of badness, while irritating, is generally considered to be non-lethal. Mercury’s sexual expression, on the other hand, is treated with hostility, and this is the polar opposite of benign. The pressures of being a gay man in the 1970s are not dealt with, or even mentioned in the film. He appears to be completely unaware of his own sexual desires. A trucker gives him a seductive side-eye in a restroom in the middle of nowhere when he falls in love with Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton). He appears shocked and disturbed when this happens. (Camera cuts to black.) We never get to see what happened after that.) After a while, Mary tells him, “You’re gay, Freddie,” to which he responds, “I believe I’m bisexual.” That’s the extent of the conversational exchange. Because the film is rated PG-13, there isn’t much sex in it to begin with, but he is only shown in a romantic setting with Mary.
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There isn’t a better word to describe this approach than “phobic.” Even though Mercury valued his relationship with Mary tremendously (he bequeathed his estate to her in his will), the subtleties of the situation and the historical context of what it meant to “come out” in the 1970s are not explored at all. In the script, it appears as though Mercury had no desire for homosexual sex until Paul Prenter (Allen Leech) came along and showed him the way to do so.
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Mercury is lured into the gay underworld of leather clubs and orgies by Paul, who is manipulative, cunning, and controlling. Mercury is taken away from the goodness, the wholesomeness, that is the rest of Queen. Following his breakup with Mercury, Prenter, who died of AIDS in 1991, gave a series of extremely damaging interviews, which were later exposed. It appears that the filmmakers have no interest in contextualizing what Paul, a self-described “queer Catholic boy from North Belfast,” may have represented to the closed-minded Mercury, or why Freddie was drawn to him in the first place. Perhaps Freddie had grown tired of spending time with his straight married friends and craved some “gay time” on his own. Nobody anticipated the arrival of AIDS. It wasn’t just that the people in those clubs were wasting their time in a state of self-loathing until a biblical plague befell them. They were having a fantastic time. It’s been a long time coming. However, nothing like that is revealed in the film. The film “Bohemian Rhapsody” portrays Paul as a villain, with AIDS serving as a punishment.
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Neither of these things is the fault of Rami Malek, whose Mercury impersonation goes well beyond the famously prominent teeth. As a result of channeling Mercury’s ferocious energy, particularly during the concert sequences, the film gives you an electric sense of what it might have been like to be there live. Malek’s performance is the sole reason for this review’s single star.
The film’s reluctance to deal with Mercury’s sexuality is disastrous because his sexuality is so intertwined with the art of Queen that the two can’t be distinguished from one another. Disappointing Mercury, Queen, Queen fans, and potential Queen fans is to do them a great service by refusing to acknowledge queerness as an artistic force—indeed, by pointing at it and suggesting that this is where Mercury went astray. The emergence of genius does not occur in a vacuum. Mercury was made up of all of the tensions and passions that he had experienced in his life: he adored Elvis, opera, music hall, costumes, Victorian England, and, yes, sex; he adored sex; he adored sex. There’s a lot of it. It is liberation that leads to sexual expression, and you can hear and feel the exhilaration of that in Mercury’s once-in-a-generation voice. You can’t talk about Freddie Mercury without talking about the queer sensibility that drove him, and the queer context in which he lived and worked. Alternatively, you can try, as in this film, but you will fail.
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