Because You Don't Know What It Means To Me

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I'm willing to bet that Freddie Mercury, for all his damage, and the boy had damage, had some fun in his life. Don't you think? He was by all accounts difficult, fucked up by the closet, a tremendous drug enthusiast. But the dude partied with groovy people and I just have my doubts that his every moment of partying was a lonesome woe, a misery. You wouldn't guess that watching Bryan Singer's Bohemian Rhapsody though, which treats his every second not spent in the studio or on stage with his "band family" (including the "love of his life" Mary Austin) as a drudge of desolation, exploitation, inextricably linking his gayness with his downfall in some "Chick Tract" type morality play nonsense, the leather-jacketed mustache queers whispering poison in the poor doomed doe's ear and finding him a swift death.

Is there truth in the telling that Mercury did get ensnarled with a lousy dude named Paul Prenter (played here by Allen Leech of Downton Abbey) who hooked him up with drugs and boys and isolated him from good decision-making, only to betray him later on? There very much is. But there is presumably also a way to tell that story without projecting a forty-year-old antiquated stance on homosexuality as truth - we've come a long way from how Freddie Mercury felt about himself, baby. Bohemian Rhapsody presents Prenter as a snug-panted serpent slithering into an Arena Rock Garden of Eden - he practically hisses every time they cut to him - and besides absolving Mercury of all responsibility for his lousy behavior the film time and again links shady gayness with seediness, meanness, and eventually disease.  

The film feels like an artifact from the 1970s and 80s, and I don't mean in a well-captured time-capsule way - its point-of-view feels moth-balled and deeply offensive here in 2018. The storytelling seems to buy Mercury's closet-bred insistence that True Love was for the Beautiful Blonde Lady alone while sex, sex with men, must remain dirty and hidden - we get a couple of quick kisses and some skulking around a truck-stop restroom beside a flouncy butch, but only once Freddie is good and sick and soundly tragedized can a man come along for him. Nevermind that in real life Mercury met and lived with Jim Hutton before he even got diagnosed with HIV - here Hutton's presented as a sexless afterthought, a balm applied to a soundly dying man.

Is there good stuff to be had in Bohemian Rhapsody? Sure. The spectacular music of Queen is there, after all. If you're gonna see the movie see it loud, with a good vibrating sound system in your seat - something should get you stiff, anyway. The concert scenes can be heaps of fun (Malek struts real well) and the remaining members of the band clearly knew the right story to tell when it was about the four of them in a room figuring out wacky noises and acapellas to drop on their immortal rock anthems. The Live Aid sequence is some killer queening indeed. But the rest of the film relentlessly poisons all around it - a black green cloud of bad stuff snorted up its own fat bottom. Freddie deserved better.