Bohemian Rhapsody: To see or not to see?

[firecat]

First I was going to see it because I like a lot of Queen's music and like Freddie. Then I heard it was homophobic and superficial (see quote at end of post), so I thought I would skip seeing it. Then a friend whose politics and taste in visual entertainment overlap mine said she liked it and said "there are SO MANY CATS." Then my favorite rock star (not sure whether politics or his taste overlaps mine in anything but music) said on FB "go and see the movie on the biggest screen available!" So now I just haven't got a clue what to do. (And yes, that's a hint about who my favorite rock star is.)

So, if you've seen it, or plan to see it, or plan not to see it, I'm curious what your thoughts are.

Sheila O'Malley's review on rogerebert.com:

[the movie] wants me to watch the costume ball scene and think, "Wow, I'm scared for Freddie. Freddie needs the stability of his (married, straight) band members to counteract the SUPER gay world he's living in." I struggled with this scene, I tried to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt. But what's onscreen is what is intended. We are meant to side with the band members, we are meant to look at Freddie with the same discomfort about him acting so, well, gay. It's unforgivable...."Bohemian Rhapsody" is bad in the way a lot of biopics are bad: it's superficial, it avoids complexity, and the narrative has a connect-the-dots quality. This kind of badness, while annoying, is relatively benign. However, the attitude towards Mercury's sexual expression is the opposite of benign.

Comments

[cjsmith]

I am similarly on the fence. I have heard from several gay male friends that they really enjoyed it; that helps, given the quote you posted. I have heard from some folk that the film erases Freddie's bisexuality, which will piss me off if I do go see it. I think I'm eventually going to see it but I'm not at all sure how I'll feel when I'm done.

[firecat]

My friend said that they did use the B-word at least once.

[cjsmith]

Good to know! Thanks.

[okoshun]

Exactly once, I believe.

[firecat]

In which case, only to negate it.

[okoshun]

Quite true.

[brooksmoses]

The good friend of mine who is very fond of Freddie and saw it says that's approximately nonsense; it doesn't try to put Freddie's sexuality into neatly-defined boxes like so many of the written biographies do, and his bisexuality is definitely there.

The flaw it does have, in his view, is that it has a "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" approach to narrative coherency -- which is to say, it doesn't actually have a narrative so much as being a sequence of events in Freddie's life that don't so much connect into a story.

So the impression I'm getting is that the movie doesn't do a very good job of telling a story and thus people who watch it are getting very different stories out of it depending on their expectations and perspective. I'll definitely be interested to see what you two think of it!

[cjsmith]

Ahh, good to have another perspective! Thank you.

And when I think about it, a life (of a person or of a band) isn't always a story in the sense of a coherent narrative. So maybe that's a flaw I won't mind so much.

[submarine_bells]

That pretty much matches my perception of the film, which I saw last week. FWIW, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It doesn't straightwash or whitewash Freddie; there's ambiguity about his sexuality that AFAIK is pretty authentic to how Freddie actually expressed himself, and the scene where he says to his female partner "I'm bisexual" and she responds with "You're gay, Freddie" was apparently a direct quote from his actual life.

My vote: go see it on biggest screen with the pumpingest sound you can find, expect a messy narrative, and expect to be wowed by Malek's performance. The movie, like Freddie's music, is epic, a bit grandiose and definitely uplifting. Seems pretty appropriate, to me.

[hitchhiker]

same. i'll come see it with you if you go, though!

[duskpeterson]

What I keep hearing from the reviews is that it has a so-so storyline but has a magnificent performance by Rami Malek. "Oscar material" is what one review said.

Also, the last time I checked at Rotten Tomatoes, the critics' assessment of the film was around 50% good, but the audience's assessment was at close to 100%, which is an interesting divergence.

I've heard so many conflicting assessments of how Freddie Mercury's sexuality was handled that my only conclusion was that I need to see the film myself.

[kore]

I think they really go for the "If only he had married Mary" thing, like with Lytton and Carrington in the Emma Thompson movie, which ignores that they basically kind of WERE married, and they also didn't want to be married, and it was a really complex relationship and he was maybe in the closet not "just" because it was a bigoted time, but because he might not have felt comfortable labelling his life and sexuality that way. I mean, nobody is expecting Hollywood to approach this with subtlety and depth and insight, but....

I'm happy it's making $$$ anyway. It sounds like a big mess on a lot of levels, but I'd've been kind of heartbroken if it had flopped.

[duskpeterson]

You've made me even more intrigued about it. :)

[kore]

LOL I haven't seen it yet! ....I probably will. I saw the Live Aid concert (live) on a tiny television. It will be amazing on a big screen.

[duskpeterson]

I hadn't thought of that! I don't have a movie theater near me, so I'll be seeing it on DVD when it reaches my public library, but the movie-theater version must be amazing.

[xiphias]

So, two things I can say about it:
1. Most of the criticisms you've heard about it are accurate.
2. I loved it.

First, as a movie, it's not very good. The first third is choppy, with short, stattico scenes which make it hard to build up a sense of narrative flow. In general, it the characters are two-dimensional cardboard versions of people who are genuinely interesting in real life. The plotline is entirely pedestrian and predictable.

As history, it's not as bad as Xena: the Warrior Princess. They compress a lot of events, obviously, in order to hit the highlights of Freddie's life. Which means that he has AIDS and the band knows before the LiveAid concert, when, in fact, he only got AIDS well after that (who knows when he became HIV+, but the point when he was symptomatic was quite a bit later). And they also manufacture some drama similarly -- Lis kept leaning over to me and saying things like, "I don't know why Roger's so upset at Freddie doing a solo album -- at this point, he's got an album and three singles of his own."

They have Freddie just HAPPEN to be in the audience the night Tim Staffel leaves Smile, so they have to get a new lead singer, when, in fact, Freddie, Roger, Brian, and Tim had been friends and hanging out for months before then, and they'd already been thinking of Freddie taking over for Tim when Tim wanted to do other things.

They set it up so that they have to get the band un-broken-up to play LiveAid -- when, in fact, the reason they had trouble working out whether they'd be in LiveAid was because there was a chance they'd be on tour in Japan at the time, and they ended up re-working their tour schedule for it. While the members of Queen, other than John Deacon, DID have solo projects, they were all in addition to recording and touring as Queen.

And they clump up things in time for dramatic reasons to a degree that just breaks suspension of disbelief: on the morning of LiveAid, he gets dressed, drives around to every "Jim Hutton" in London to find the guy that he met a few years earlier, asks him to date, takes Jim to his parents' house to let them know that Queen is going to be on LiveAid that afternoon, something that apparently his parents, who lived in the Feltham neighborhood of London and were not weird recluses or anything, and who, in fact, regularly got VIP tickets to Queen concerts, had been unaware of, then gets to Wembley in plenty of time to prep, sit around, fret some, and generally be there on time.

It also deeply cuts down on Freddie's sluttiness, and the band's in general. They don't have even ONE dwarf with a tray of cocaine strapped to his head while strippers are wrestling in a tub of liver. In real life, the 1978 release party for Jazz is kind of legendary... and in the movie, it consists of the band sitting around and drinking champagne and then leaving early, except for Freddie, who stays around and drinks MORE champagne. Freddie occasionally looks longingly at guys, maybe flirts, maybe makes out a little. The movie is rated PG-13. And THAT rating is for language -- Freddie himself is portrayed PG. Freddie did NOT have a PG life, and to present him as such is misleading.

As for bi erasure -- yeah. Lemme just tell you the quote so you can be braced for it; I winced in pain, and this isn't even a particularly personal issue for me.

Freddie and Mary Austin are talking about their relationship, and what's going wrong in it.
FREDDIE: Mary, I think I'm ... bisexual.
MARY: No, Freddie, you're gay. I've known for a while.

It actually hurts worse when you see it delivered... just... be ready for it if you're going to see it.

And yet... I loved it.

I recommend it, not exactly with reservations, but with caveats. Compressing the timeline, shifting events around, creating drama by making characters more shallow -- those are all things which I expected and didn't mind. The occasionally amateurish direction in the first third, You need to decide if you are comfortable rolling with the bi erasure -- and not just IGNORING it, but actively DENYING it. That's the main thing I can see that is actively problematic; everything else is what I would expect.

But it's a lot of fun. Once it gets rolling, it has the energy you want; the actors are charismatic and pretty and you like spending time with them. You get the sense that the members of Queen really DO love each other, no matter how much they fight -- including Mary -- which is accurate.

And Rami Malek, Gwylim Lee, Ben Hardy, and Joe Mazzello are uncanny. In a lot of ways, I enjoyed this movie like I would a magic trick, rather than as a movie -- it's just fun seeing the skill of the transformation.

So, to summarize: not a good movie when looked at as a movie. Deeply problematic bi erasure. Amazing energy, a hell of a lot of fun, emotionally satisfying, if you are comfortable getting past those things.

[kore]

They don't have even ONE dwarf with a tray of cocaine strapped to his head while strippers are wrestling in a tub of liver.

Now that should be the lead in a movie review.

[xiphias]

Note that I chose that because they're more of the LESS extreme things suggested. The "naked wrestling in liver" is well-documented, to the point of receipts from butcher shops. The "dwarfs with trays of cocaine strapped to their heads" thing ranges from, on the tame explanation, "no, that didn't happen -- the dwarfs were walking around with hors d'oeuvres trays on their heads, and there was just this one guest who used the tray to snort their OWN coke" to "there were a dozen naked hermaphroditic dwarfs carrying full bowls of cocaine."

... I tend to go to the first end, since I KNOW dwarfs who work catering events and can totally see that happening, and I'm not convinced that even New Orleans has a full dozen hermaphroditic dwarfs who work parties.

[duskpeterson]

I seem to recall (but don't have full access to the web right now, so I can't check) that Mary's line about Freddie being gay is something she actually said; I think she mentions it in an interview.

And therein lies a lot of my trouble in judging the historical aspects of the film: I don't know what the film-makers' sources were. As another example, I ran across a statement by one of Freddie Mercury's biographers (not in connection with this movie) that Mercury had a sore throat at Live Aid, which is a common symptom of one of the illnesses caused by AIDS. The biographer said that Mercury may well have suspected that he had AIDS when he performed at Live Aid. Obviously, that's pure speculation on her part (though not entirely unreasonable; during that period, any small illness could seem like the entrance of the Grim Reaper). But if the scriptwriter knew of that statement of hers, then it wouldn't be such a stretch for the scriptwriter to turn that speculation into a conversation between Mercury and his band-mates.

So any time the facts are fictionalized in the film, I don't know whether the fictionalization is inspired by some historical source I haven't read - or, for that matter, on information supplied privately by Mercury's band-mates.

[xiphias]

Oh, it's absolutely true that Mary dealt with the complexity of their relationship by deciding that the reason things weren't working out was because he was gay, not bi. But given the degree of poetic license the movie was already taking, they didn't HAVE to go with that line of dialogue, or at least, not without SOME form of pushback somewhere. When the screenwriters and movie creators are already fictionalizing things, they are responsible for what they choose to fictionalize and what they choose not to.

[duskpeterson]

Yes, that's an error I see a lot in historical fiction: dialogue that is technically historically accurate, but leave the reader with the impression that the author agrees with the character. It's horribly difficult to thematically condemn a character's remark without sinking into propaganda. Obviously, the scriptwriter wasn't up to the task - or else they agreed with Mary, which would be, um, I don't know what to call it, given that Freddie Mercury seemed to have eschewed labels. I tend to agree with you that the line should have been omiited.

[okoshun]

Thank you for this - I had some questions and not really knowing the history felt that I really couldn't take the movie at face value but wasn't sure what elements they would dramatize for the sake of drama.

It's not a fantastic movie for many of the reasons that you mention and there is so much that is simplified into digestible bites. BUT, trying to fit a man's life into 2 hours..you have to expect that. The performances were fantastic. I did really enjoy the film even with its flaws.

[kore]

I'm really torn about it. Queen is one of my favourite bands, some of the first rock songs and rock videos I ever heard, and I've heard Malek's performance is amazing, the music is amazing, and if you're going to see it, see it on a big screen. And in the larger scheme of things, paying to see it would be supporting a queer film that is aiming for mainstream recognition, like Philadelphia or Brokeback Mountain, and spotlighting a queer man as a serious artist.

BUT, like Philadelphia and Brokeback Mountain, it also sounds deeply flawed. It does sound like there's a big emphasis on the heterosexual stable home life of the bandmates (who were the ones who produced the film IIRC), the supposed sick Svengali relationship between Freddie and his Evil Boyfriend, and the really warped timeline where he begs the band to come back, he has AIDS, he tells them BEFORE LIVE AID and then does the Live Aid concert while supposedly seriously ill. That is enraging. Also the stuff about him wanting to go out solo and not making it and begging the band to take him back. That goes beyond distorting a timeline for narrative economy or dramatic license, to me, it's saying Freddie was this unstable camp genius who depended on his het bro bandmates to keep him on the STRAIGHT and narrow and whose genius was mixed up with a pathological sex life. I guess him performing at Live Aid while supposedly ill is meant to be a Triumph of the Human Spirit Hollywood-style, but it just makes me so angry. It's so manipulative and deliberately obtuse.

BUT, I've also heard the music is great and if you're going to see it do it in a theatre, &c &c. It certainly looks like it's making enough money that it doesn't desperately need my ticket money. I dunno.

[duskpeterson]

"It does sound like there's a big emphasis on the heterosexual stable home life of the bandmates"

That's the bit that worries me the most, because man, have I heard that plotline too often.

This might have been an attempt by the scriptwriter to simplify the obvious truth that Freddie Mercury excelled in being unconventional. But if so, the gay vs het comparison is a really bad way to approach it.

[xiphias]

None of the families of the other members of Queen are characters. They're MENTIONED, as things that exist, and I think that some of the women who are sitting with them in one of the parties are supposed to be wives? but they're not there as characters.

And the sick Svengali relationship between Freddie and Paul was real.

But yeah. All of that.

[kore]

None of the families of the other members of Queen are characters. They're MENTIONED, as things that exist, and I think that some of the women who are sitting with them in one of the parties are supposed to be wives? but they're not there as characters.

Booooo to that.

[oracne]

I promised to see it with the college friend who got me into Queen, so the decision was taken out of my hands.