"Bohemian Rhapsody"

Who was Freddie Mercury? To the general public, he was a larger-than-life rock icon, a pioneering musical genius whose sexually fluid showmanship transcended boundaries and set a standard of showmanship never since surpassed. To those who knew him, he was a man of many contradictions, as shy as he was extravagant, as selfish as he was kind, a flamboyant figure whose hedonistic excesses were matched by his coyness regarding his private life.

All biopics, to one degree or another, have to answer such a question but the unique sociocultural complexities of Freddie Mercury’s identity make it particularly essential to Bohemian Rhapsody’s central thesis. He was a queer Parsi immigrant who resisted any such categorization as strongly as his music did; how did his relationship with his own identity affect his art? How did his music, in turn, express the truth of who he was – if at all?

Bohemian Rhapsody tentatively touches on these questions but fails to probe them beyond a surface level. Instead, it moves through his life as if it were a series of questions on an exam sheet, each answer technically correct but unedifying and uninformative beyond the simple assertion of facts and summaries.

Early scenes of Mercury’s life with his family show him at odds with his tradition-minded father (“good words, good deeds, good thoughts”) who disapprovingly notes his adoption of “Freddie” as an anglicized alternative to his birth name Farrokh, implying a rejection of his heritage. This accusation of assimilation is reflected in the third act when a jilted ex-manager (and ex-lover) disparages him as remaining at heart a “scared P*** boy” – also echoing a loutish audience member’s racial slur during the band’s first performance. Mercury’s own feelings about his ethnic identity, cultural heritage and sense of belonging, however, remain elusive; twice he voices his vision of Queen as belonging to those who don’t belong anywhere, but the screenplay seems curiously uninterested in digging any deeper. In lieu of conflict, we simply get a half familiar all-too-quickly-resolved arc of a queer man coming out to his conservative father and finally earning his approval.

The clearest indications about Freddie Mercury’s inner struggles come from conversations with his long-suffering ex-girlfriend Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton) during which they talk about the adulation of the crowd. They frame his excessive partying, poor choice in friends as manifestations of a need for love and validation directly connected with struggles over his sexuality and self-presentation. Mercury’s life, the film suggests, was defined by an ongoing quest to be his own person and to figure out who that person was. That’s not a bad perspective to take but it requires a certain willingness to take risks in cutting through Freddie’s self-image and examining his insecurities – risks that director Bryan Singer is unwilling to take.

As a band, Queen were bold, innovative and risqué. They blurred lines between genres, experimented throughout their career while remaining distinctly mainstream, and exuded – largely through Freddie’s songs and stage performances – a titillating sexual energy that was naughty, playful and brash but never crude. A director truly in touch with that energy would have connected it to Freddie’s unapologetic individuality and used it to illuminate the secret feelings that animated it but Singer instead plays things disappointingly safe, mainly using Queen’s music as bland illustrations of selected “making-of” scenes that tell us very little about how these songs actually came about or what drove them. Freddie’s passion for music and art are only glanced at, taken for granted as if they sprang ready-made from his mouth. Even his famously lavish, drug-fuelled parties are a shockingly tame affair, devoid of any danger or sensuousness, as if someone had recut The Wolf Of Wall Street for pensioners.

Only intermittently does the film match its subject’s personality, in montages where Queen’s music comes to life in voicing the nuances of Freddie’s sexuality (ironically, with two songs he didn’t write). One sees a performances of “Another One Bites The Dust” interspersed with Freddie being guided by Svengali-esque manager/lover Paul Prenter (Allen Leech) into the gay leather sex club Mineshaft, culminating in a frontal shot of him entering a dark room at the top before a cut to black segues into a press conference during which he starts exhibiting HIV symptoms. Strongly reminiscent of Cruising, this sequence is as evocative as it is problematic in its tonal implications, using the song’s unmistakeable beat to strong erotic effect while also questioning the feelings behind Mercury’s iconic sexual expression. Another cheeky flourish involves Freddie talking to Mary on a payphone as a trucker invitingly walks in a men’s restroom as “Fat Bottomed Girls” climaxes to the lyric “Get on your bikes and ride!”. While arguably misrepresentative, these montages nevertheless show a flair and musical understanding that’s missing from the rest of the film, probably attributable to late-stage replacement Dexter Fletcher.

That a mediocrity like Singer ended up helming a biopic about one of pop music’s great geniuses would only be shocking if the surviving band members’ understandable protectiveness of Mercury’s legacy wasn’t common knowledge. The choice to use the 1985 Live Aid concert, widely seen as the band’s finest live performance and the moment that propelled them back to the top after a brief dip, is quite revealing in that respect: It allows screenwriters Anthony McCarten (already responsible for the equally over-reverent The Theory Of Everything and Darkest Hour) and Peter Morgan to evacuate any of the real pain that might come with dealing with Mercury’s flaws or his struggle with AIDS and instead package his experience into a ready-made, one-size-fits-all tale of redemption and triumph.

This lack of honesty makes the task of Mr. Robot’s Rami Malek all the more unenviable, and his success in doing so feels almost miraculous. While he lacks some of Mercury’s swagger, he underlines his vulnerability and sense of displacement with a subtle precision that lends his scenes insight that’s often missing from the dialogue. His best moments involve small tonal shifts in his voice and body movements that clues us in on the fear beneath Freddie’s exterior cockiness, whether he’s criticizing his bandmates or phoning Mary with a glass of champagne to combat loneliness. Moments such as those hint at the film Bohemian Rhapsody could have been were it more interested in taking a closer look at Freddie’s inner life than in hitting biographical checkpoints.

It was perhaps a fool’s errand to expect any Hollywood film to shine light on the complexities of Freddie Mercury’s life, art and identity, particularly at a time when things are more commodified than they ever were before, but his genius deserved much better than the audiovisual equivalent of an authorized biography. Neither real life nor fantasy, this Bohemian Rhapsody remains resolutely stuck far too safely in the middle, too afraid of harming its subject’s image to illuminate it in any significant way.