With story-by credit for screenwriter, Peter Morgan (The Crown, The Kings Speech) it seems a new ‘Queen’ is born in Rami Malek’s Freddie Mercury…most certainly a front-runner for this year’s Best Actor category of the Oscars.
Farrokh Bulsara a.ka. “Freddie Mercury” (Rami Malek, Mr. Robot) was just a kid from Middlesex, England with a four-octave vocal range, and a bad set of ‘extra’ Jack-rabbit teeth. He longed to be a star. Raised by his Indian parents first in Zanzibar, and then the UK, he was a baggage handler at Heathrow with a dream and a notepad to scribble lyrics. But his father insisted on good thoughts and good deeds. Freddie, hearing nothing of it, instead found his passion in a band with guitarist Brian May (Gwilym Lee), base-player, John Deacon (Joseph Mazzello), and drummer Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy).
It’s there that he finds another passion, Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton) as he struts on stage like a Mick Jagger peacock, with vocals unmatched. This was the 70s. This was “We will rock you!” and rock us he did. He also sexed up, drugged up, and lived up to a certain flamboyance leaving any nay-sayer in his dust. Poor, Mary.
His manager, Ray (Mike Myers) has one of the more amusing lines of the film when he challenges the title for “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Says Ray, “it goes on forever. Six bloody minutes,” to which Mercury replies, “I pity your wife if you think six minutes is forever.”
The band grows rapidly from selling out pubs south of Glasgow; from NYC to Perth, Chicago to Rio and eventually around the globe, finally selling out Wembley Stadium for LIVE AID in the 80s. (there were 13 satellite, 1.5 billion people, and one happy father watching his son on the “telly.”)
But while Malek performs the role with such perfection – channeling Freddie Mercury as if you’re really certain he’s come back to life – the rock-and-roll bit of the film is too tidy. The film goes darker as it progresses, but initially it’s too polite. Where’s the smell of morning-after orgies, the broken whiskey bottles, and the usual ego-shit that drives an artist to behave insane? Instead you have (at least in the first hour) a Partridge Family band. Where’s Queen?
Ah, but the soundtrack is pure ear-candy, deliberately bringing all our bong-toting memories back to the forefront. One has to wonder if its not suspension of disbelief in how they came up with the concept of “We Will Rock You” and “Killer Queen” etc, but heck, it works.
Mercury wins us over as vulnerable and self-hating. He’s lonely (sabotaging any type of love), tortured (as any true artist), frightened (as any fear-based soul), and plain ole f&*ck-ed up. But that’s the price of genius if one has ever loved any type of composer.
The film’s finale raises our blood pressure and heightens our pulses the way an Oscar contender should deliver in a big theatrical way. Director Bryan Singer gives us a biopic that has its moments of flaw early-on, but maybe that’s because he walked off the set (internal problems.) Speaking of artists…