Hear Me Out: ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is the worst music biopic of all time
By the end, Bohemian Rhapsody finally got me. The last 20 minutes of the Freddie Mercury biopic, a beat-for-beat recreation of the titanic Live Aid set from Queen, are masterful. It’s Rami Malek’s finest moment as the film’s subject, despite doing his best throughout. The intercutting of the band on stage with the effect they’re having on individual audience members is inspired. Above all, though, the reveal that the screens on either side of the stage are showing the original footage from 1985 broke me. I was sobbing in my seat while also raging at the fact that quite possibly the worst film I’ve ever seen could still manipulate me this brazenly.
Because that’s what Bohemian Rhapsody is. The worst movie I’ve ever paid money to see. It still galls me that I contributed to the astonishing box office draw of this crass, exploitative, bile-fuelled act of score-settling. It goes beyond the usual craven money-worship you get from Hollywood pictures as well. That’s so par for the course you might as well blame the sea for storming. What devastates me is how much this feculent smear on Queen’s legacy seems to be exactly what Brian May and Roger Taylor wanted it to be.
I could be wrong about this. I have no more insight into the making of this cinematic pint of bleach than anyone else. The further you look, though, the more every cursed decision in this film comes back to May and Taylor wanting to make the story of Queen more about them. To start with, the editing is an absolute mess. Multiple scenes descend into a bizarre mess of close-ups of minor characters nodding thoughtfully or smiling at each other for no reason.
It’s enough to make you think that certain members of the band had a contractually mandated amount of screen time the film had to give them. Contractually mandated screen time in a film that was, and I can’t stress this enough, not about them. Imagine if every scene in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone cut away multiple times to show you what Dean Thomas thought of the situation.
When it comes to legacies overshadowed by problematic portrayals, Bohemian Rhapsody presents a troubling depiction of Freddie Mercury’s queerness. The film consistently associates his sexuality with the more turbulent aspects of his life, framing his relationships with men during Queen’s early US tours as a betrayal of Mary Austin rather than a reflection of his identity. His introduction to the gay nightlife scene is portrayed as a spiral into excess and self-destruction rather than the period of creative and personal rejuvenation it truly was.
It even fails when it tries to depict the “wholesome” gay relationship between Mercury and Jim Hutton. Bafflingly, they have the gall to depict the relationship starting with Freddie groping Hutton, an employee of his, before even talking to him. That said, this is a movie made by Brian Singer, “Write what you know,” I guess.
The film places Freddie’s salvation squarely in the heterosexual members of his personal life, who are all completely blameless, squeaky-clean angels who never do anything wrong, ever. They also, by and large, made the film. What a coincidence. However, I don’t believe this movie is homophobic on purpose. It still absolutely is homophobic, but I can chalk that up to ignorance, arrogance and incompetence over outright malice. What I hate most of all is what this film is actually, purposely trying to achieve.
The story goes that the first time this film was pitched to Hollywood (by May and Taylor, no less), it was pitched thus. “You’ll never guess the twist that happens halfway through!”, “What happens?”, “Freddie dies!” It’s true. The first incarnation of this film was as much about May, Taylor, and bassist John Deacon continuing the band after Freddie’s death as it was about the band in their heyday, and y’know what? It’s not a bad idea.
There is an affecting story to be told there about grief, about how to move on when the worst thing possible happens, a story that, above all, is about the band Queen as a whole. Not, crucially, their singer. The very fact that May and Taylor took a story about Freddie Mercury, not just their friend and bandmate but a real-life human being, and made it about them would be bad enough. The true arrogance comes through when you realize that their presence in the story seems to be twofold.
They are there to be morally perfect in the face of Freddie’s transgressions and write Queen songs. So no, May and Taylor weren’t trying to tell a story about grief. They were trying to tell a story about how they wrote Queen songs, too. When they realised they couldn’t get enough people in a story just about that; they perverted the biopic about Freddie Mercury to be about that instead.
Not a single scene about the music goes by without some stunted, awkward dialogue where another member of the band makes a musical suggestion, and Freddie tries to push back on before going, “Of course, Rog/Bry/Deaky, that’s a great idea.” What could possibly make them think this was worth making a film about?
I think the key lies in the worst scene in the whole movie. The moment I realised just what an artistic miscarriage this whole thing was. During the sequence of the band recording the title song, right when the immortal riff kicks in, we get an animated montage of all the song’s bad reviews. There. Right fucking there, beats the black heart of this film.
To May, to Taylor, to everyone involved in this film, it wasn’t enough to have been in Queen. It wasn’t enough to have worldwide fame, Scrooge McDuck levels of wealth, the almost unmatched levels of artistic influence. One can have all that and still feel bitter, like you need to get one over on all those nasty critics who didn’t fellate you as hard as you feel you deserved. Sure, the song was rapturously received in the press and was the biggest hit song of the year, but that doesn’t matter. Not when there are people who disagree and have the scrote to admit it. Not when someone else might be getting a little bit more of the credit than you are.
That is why I hate this ungodly film. Because it’s exactly what it was intended to be. It takes the life of one of the most influential gay people to have ever lived and makes it about how Roger Taylor wrote ‘I’m In Love With My Car’ and Brian May penned ‘We Will Rock You’ instead.
It breaks my heart that this film was made by a group of people who, no matter how close they were to the man, seemed to care so little about Freddie Mercury that they were happy to pervert his memory and his message simply to further their own thriving careers.
