A Celebration of a Force of Nature
It's wild to me that Bohemian Rhapsody - the musical biopic about the life of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury - has already hit its 5th anniversary. Released on November 2, 2018, in the United States, the film chronicles the story of Queen’s formation in 1970 through to their famous 1985 Live Aid performance at Wembley Stadium.
It's wild to me that it's been five years since its release because I remember the anticipation I felt about it like it was yesterday. In fact, I wrote about it here, for Story Screen, five years ago in my article about South Asian representation in media. I remember my elation when it was announced that Rami Malek was cast as Mercury, especially given that the industry buzz for so long was that Sacha Baron Cohen was in the top running for the role. Casting Cohen would have been infuriating, regardless of his superficial physical resemblance to Mercury, because it is offensive - period, end of story - to have a white actor play a character of Indian origin. Malek's casting was not a 100% perfect choice, but given that Mercury was born to a British Parsi family it was pretty damn close; Parsis are an ethnoreligious group within India that adhere to the Zoroastrian religion, and are descended from Persians who migrated to Medieval India during and after the Arab conquest of the Persian Empire.
Rami Malek is the child of Middle Eastern immigrants. Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Bulsara) was the child of Indian immigrants who descended from the Middle East.
Sacha Baron Cohen is a white man.
Brownface is not okay.
I'll stop pounding on this drum now; I think you get my point.
The film is not without its flaws; there are some timeline discrepancies in the film regarding when certain Queen songs and albums were released and which tours they were on and when - the kind of stuff that would be very annoying to music history pedants like me. The film does seem to very strongly suggest that Mercury was gay when by all accounts he was bisexual. I'm not a fan of the film’s bi-erasure and the entire story of how Queen ended up participating in Live Aid seems to have been invented in cold cloth to ratchet up character drama. In the film, Mercury comes back to his band after working on a middling solo career, hat in hand, apologizing for being an egomaniac and implores them to agree to participate in the benefit concert, and they really make him beg for it, whereas in real life, by all accounts, the band had already agreed to reunite to do the show without all of this behind-the-scenes melodrama and weren’t having petty squabbles about it.
I wonder about the need to invent character tension for tensions' sake, I wonder why these timeline liberties were taken, and I wonder about the bi-erasure, mostly because Queen’s guitarist Brian May, and drummer Roger Taylor, were heavily involved in the film's production. They were there, they knew and loved Freddie Mercury, and it seems puzzling to me that they would be okay with that level of dramatic liberty taken with a story that is as much about their lives as it is about Mercury's.
Despite these quibbles, what makes this film such a joy to watch are its performances. Malek quite simply disappears into the role of Freddie; he captures his speaking patterns, mannerisms, and incomparable physicality with such ease. His performance is astonishing, and the Oscar he received for it was well-deserved. But while Malek carries the film, it's worth noting that the producers did an amazing job in casting the rest of Queen - Gwilym Lee looks and sounds exactly like May, from the wacky perm to his politely bemused-yet-affectionate attitude towards Freddie's flamboyance. Ben Hardy captures Taylor's bad-boy attitude and intense drumming style with great aplomb. Joe Mazzello nails bassist John Deacon's quintessential pragmatism, unfussiness, and impeccable precision (all qualities in any good bass player - as a bass player, I know of which I speak!).
The four actors together have incredible chemistry and they really feel like a band - a band of exceptional and visionary musicians, a band of brothers, a true family who loves each other, not despite each others' quirks and foibles, but because of them. It's heartwarming to see how kind and gentle and supportive May, Deacon, and Taylor were when Mercury informs them that he has been diagnosed with AIDS because we know that that's how they were in real life. They were a band that was loudly groundbreaking when it came to musical inventiveness and exploration, and they were also quietly groundbreaking in that three straight rock-n-roll lads from London were so accepting of their friend and frontman's sexuality and his struggles to fully accept himself. This film is a celebration of those unique qualities that made Queen the musical and pop cultural force of nature that it was. The end of the film is a near-recreation of their famous Live Aid set, and I remember sitting in the theater watching it back in 2018, feeling choked up by the nostalgia of it all - which is absurd, because I was only three months old when Live Aid happened and till that day in the theater, I had only seen Queen's Live Aid set on YouTube.
But that's the thing about Freddie Mercury - his voice, that magnificent, four-octave range - was and is a voice that captured the hearts of people all over the world, and echoes on and on, even three decades after his death at the age of 45. Far too young. AIDS was a guaranteed death sentence back when Mercury was diagnosed with it - and it was considered a guaranteed death sentence for most of my childhood as well. It's wild to me that we now live in a world where that is no longer the case - where it is now treated as a chronic condition that can be managed with medication and lived with indefinitely. If Freddie Mercury had survived long enough to benefit from the significant advances in medical research and the treatment of AIDS, I am certain that we would still be watching Queen do world tours along with their contemporaries like the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and Paul McCartney.
I've seen the Stones, Bruce, and Paul live in concert many times. But what I wouldn't give, as a musician of Indian origin myself, for an opportunity to see Freddie Mercury live, to hear that glorious voice and feel that unstoppable charisma. It sadly won't ever happen, but there's always YouTube - and there's always Rami Malek, channeling him so wonderfully in this film. It's not 100% perfect, but it's pretty damn close.
Reeya Banerjee
Staff Writer
Reeya is a musician and writer based in New York's Capital District. Her debut album, “The Way Up,” was released on January 27, 2022. She can frequently be seen in her car on the NYS Thruway cursing traffic on her way to the Hudson Valley for band rehearsals or to Brooklyn for recording sessions. In her other life, she works as a staff accountant for a management company that oversees veterinary practices nationwide, enjoys watching Law & Order SVU returns while eating gummy bears, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use.
