Sunday, March 3, 2019

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY - WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN


Before I start I’d like to clarify something. I’m a 70’s rock fan hence a Queen fan. I also place Mercury as one of the top 3 lead singers of all time and I have no doubt he’s the best front man I’ve ever seen.

Given the above, I was excited to see the movie as soon as it was premiered in Melbourne. Just from the trailers you could see that Rami Malek would be perfect for the role (something that landed on him after Sasha Baron-Cohen quit the role)

The movie was your typical biopic of a well know personality. It was not about Queen, it was about Freddie Mercury itself.

Even though I enjoyed the movie I didn’t find anything extraordinary about it other than Malek’s performance as Mercury. In fact the rest of the cast was somewhat bland, probably not because of the actors by because of the script itself. It seemed like Roger Taylor and Brian May got together with Bryan Singer (the Director) and Anthony McCarten (screen writer) and said: “OK let’s get someone who can play Freddie,” and once they found him they said: “OK now we need to write a story around it”.

This is a formula for success that has always worked in Hollywood. You find someone to portray a well known personality and you will sell tickets. It worked with Jamie Foxx (Ray Charles); Ben Kingsley (Ghandi); Eddie Redmayne (Stephen Hawking); Daniel Day Lewis (Lincoln) and so on. And don’t get me wrong, all of these guys did tremendous jobs but sometimes movies lose focus when they only revolve around one specific character.

As I said above, I liked the movie, but I feel it lacked depth. I was expecting the script would probe deep into Mercury’s troubled personal life; his difficulty to accept his sexual condition; his fight against addiction; his feelings of loneliness and more importantly his battle with AIDS and the relationship with his fellow band members. I think all those things were mentioned in a rush, barely scratching the surface of each one of these personal dramas.

Other movies like “Ray” went deep into the psyche of the main character, exploring the origin of their traumas and how they battled against them. I couldn’t find much of this in here. I felt like watching a documentary with a very good actor.

So, besides the superb performance by Rami Malek, who has deserved every one of the awards he’s received this season, and the sound, I couldn’t find anything else to like in particular.

And there’s the issue of the historical inaccuracies. All biopics slightly modify facts for dramatic reasons or to enhance aspects of the life of the characters but in this case they changed many facts that were relevant to the story. In the movie, Mercury confesses to the band that he has AIDS just before the Live Aid Concert in 1985. This isn’t correct. Mercury was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987, two years after Live Aid. In the movie they make it look like Mercury approached Taylor and May by chance after a concert when their lead singer had left and offered to sing for their band. In reality Mercury had been a roommate of May for quite a while and knew them well before this incident. In another scene Mercury announces that he will be recording solo albums away from Queen to which Taylor and May take offense. In real life Roger Taylor had already recorded solo albums before Mercury as they had an arrangement to do solo work while still with the band.

In summary, an entertaining movie with a master performance, but it left me wanting more. I think it was a lost opportunity to dissect the personality of one of the greatest entertainers of the 20th Century.

This is, at least, my opinion. And I might be wrong.

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