![]() ![]() (The filming of Malek’s onstage performances as Freddie, which are chopped to bits and reduced to cliché-riddled snippets, is particularly insensitive.) But at its best the film is spare and clarifying, and ideologically unambiguous: its strength is in the positioning of Mercury as an artist who confronts opposition throughout society-including from the very institutions that he needs in order to succeed. The direction of the film (credited to Bryan Singer, who was fired late in the production and replaced by Dexter Fletcher but is granted sole credit) is often oddly denatured, flip, and incurious, and its lack of vision keeps the movie far short of its-and, above all, of Malek’s-finest inspirations. The scene offers Freddie one of the script’s great arias, on the subject of his ambitions, as he tells the businessman that he’s playing “for the outcasts in the back” because those are the people with whom he himself identifies. He gives the band the new name of Queen he arranges the crucial meeting, with Elton John’s manager (Aidan Gillen), that will put the band on the map and, at that meeting, he sells the manager on the band’s future hit-making successes. He decides that the band should sell its van to finance the recording of an album, and, in the studio, he orchestrates its production as well as the unusual studio techniques with which they create it. ![]() When the band’s music begins to crystallize, Freddie masterminds its path to success. In one of the movie’s exemplary scenes, Freddie is at home with his parents, planning an escape into music (and declaring that his name is no longer his given one of Farrokh but, rather, Freddie) his father instead preaches to him a credo, exhorting him to pursue “good thoughts, good words, good deeds.” Freddie’s retort isn’t a variation on “boring”-it’s, “And how has that worked out for you?” His father’s virtuous modesty hasn’t brought success in the face of prejudice Freddie’s bold self-assertion is meant to do so. ![]() And he’s from a poor family whose struggles he relates to discrimination. Born Farrokh Bulsara, he’s an ethnic Parsi, a descendant of the Zoroastrians who fled Persia for India more than a millennium ago in Great Britain, he’s frequently insulted as a “Paki.” (At his airport job, he meekly replies that he’s not from Pakistan.) He’s also a bisexual man in a country that had only recently decriminalized homosexuality, at a time when it was widely considered shameful, or at least indecent. But the band has just lost its lead singer, and so Freddie does a spontaneous audition for them-not, however, before they make fun of his facial deformity and suggest that it’s an insurmountable obstacle to his becoming a band member, let alone its front man.Ī protruding mouth isn’t the only trait for which Freddie endures insults. Freddie first shows off that range in a parking lot outside a club, where he’s trying to get members of a local band to take one of his songs. He was born, as Freddie says, with four extra incisors, and the larger oral chamber is the reason for his large vocal range. Mercury, who played piano and guitar, is of course depicted as being possessed of a formidable vocal technique, a remarkable near-operatic voice-but it’s presented as a natural gift that’s also a curse. The movie shows no years of dedicated practice or earlier musical life or ambition his sole primordial effort is a song that he scribbles on a piece of paper and keeps folded up in his pocket while working, as a young man in London, as an airport baggage handler. “Bohemian Rhapsody” offers nothing of Mercury’s childhood in Zanzibar, his schooling in Bombay, his lifelong devotion to rock and roll. It’s mostly interested in his private life in relation to a single big idea: success and its price. (In the movie, Freddie-as we’ll call the character, to distinguish him from the historical Mercury-states that he’s bisexual and is shown to be in two long-term relationships with men, though it only hints at any casual ones.) But “Bohemian Rhapsody” isn’t a comprehensive bio-pic, nor a full-spectrum consideration of Mercury’s life-it is a clearly and carefully oriented vision of his career. In fact, it is clear about Mercury’s sexual orientation. The movie has been criticized for its lack of attention to the specifics of his sex life. If so, “ Bohemian Rhapsody,” a superficially clichéd yet thematically unusual bio-pic about the band’s lead singer and guiding spirit, Freddie Mercury ( Rami Malek), delivers that secondhand rock memory by rooting its story less in the primary experience of the band’s performances than in a subtly revisionist, sharply current view of Mercury’s life and work. It may be that the only way to experience a full measure of Queen nostalgia is not to have heard the band the first time around-to indulge in vicarious nostalgia, a homecoming to somebody else’s home.
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