REVIEW: 'Bohemian Rhapsody' and the biopic problem
Rami Malek stars as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, directed by Bryan Singer.
The great irony about Bohemian Rhapsody is that Rami Malek’s performance is getting a lot of well-deserved praise, yet most critics seem to dislike this film because of its version of Freddie Mercury. Well, we can’t really have it both ways, can we? That’s the inherent difficulty with biopics, of which we’ve had two buzzworthy ones this year – this one and Vice – and both just received Oscar nominations for Best Picture.
The truth is, everyone had sort of made up their minds of who Freddie Mercury was before they stepped into the theatre, and anything that didn’t jive with their preconceptions was basically tossed in the trash. Adam McKay’s film felt like character assassination, and if you didn’t already “get it” with the image of Dick Cheney’s heartless body – literally – in the film’s final scenes, it’s one more Jesse Plemons-monologue away from being a Michael Moore film. We did not have this problem with John Nash.
See? You had to look it up. A refresher: Russell Crowe was at his peak at the turn of the millennium, and after winning the Oscar for Gladiator in 2001, he was gunning for his second straight by playing a schizophrenic math genius in A Beautiful Mind. I bet you can’t even remember who wrote that biography, what prize it won and what year it came out. I remember, because I tried to pretend that I was really smart but gave up after the first few chapters… but the point I’m trying to make here is that people know Queen and that Freddie Mercury died of AIDS and that Dick Cheney was Bush’s VP, but barely anyone knows it was Sylvia Nasar and that it won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998.
The issue seems to be that people were expecting this gritty, dark, maybe occasionally hilarious R-rated biopic of one of the greatest rock singers in history, like a better version of Oliver Stone’s The Doors. We expected the dirtiest sex, the hardest drugs and the loudest rock n’ roll. We got none of those things.
Take a look at Wikipedia’s entry:
When we start debating historical accuracy in film, it ends up being an endless argument that can lose sight of what the film actually is. There wasn’t the same amount of criticism about A Beautiful Mind’s portrayal of Nash, who had abandoned his unborn child and reportedly bashed Jews. It was a film that worked in spite of the truth.
There is legitimate criticism against Bohemian Rhapsody; it is a very uninteresting film that plays like a two-hour music video with various scraps of dialogue thrown in to transition from song to song, and other than Malek’s Mercury none of the other supporting characters can hold your attention for very long. But we were never going to get anything but a watered-down version anyway when Sacha Baron Cohen left the project and Brian May and Roger Taylor insisted on protecting a part of Freddie Mercury’s past/legacy/aura (choose one). Biopics are controversial in nature because people are polarizing, and so much of what is considered fact is unfortunately determined by the court of public opinion. Hell, the title isn’t even QUEEN or MERCURY, it’s the title of their signature song – y’know, the one that MAKES A LOT OF MONEY. Historical accuracy and truth were not exactly the highest priorities.
A Beautiful Mind succeeded (and also won Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars) because it took Nash’s mathematical brilliance and struggle with mental illness and wrapped it up in a dramatic spy thriller. It can be loosely adapted because it’s a relatively unknown story (pipe down, math nerds) and the audience wouldn’t know fact from fiction either way. With Mercury, it’s different. We have expectations that need to be met, and these days everyone demands a lot.
Still, you can make an entertaining biopic work even if you gloss over every truth or lie, and I would be lying if I said Bohemian Rhapsody wasn’t uplifting.
Bohemian Rhapsody gets two and a half stars out of four.
