We got what we got, and it says something about the movie that the two characters I was rooting for were Jim “Miami” Beach and John Deacon, as Queen’s lawyer and bass player respectively. They were not very rock and roll, and their quiet determination to look after their friends and get the job done struck a chord with me. There’s moment - blink and you’ll miss it - at the Wembley set where Joe Mazzello is standing there waiting for everything else to start. He’s stoically resting both arms along the top of his bass, and there’s something in that stance which recalls generations of soldiers leaning on their weapons, just daring the horde out there to come and get it. I liked Mazzello’s version of John Deacon.
Of course, these are not the big deal. The big deal is Rami Malek doing Freddie Mercury, and the recreation of the Live Aid set.
First off, thanks to Mr Robot, I’ll take a shot at anything which Rami Malek tries; he’s just an interesting actor with an awful lot of presence. And his Freddie is unsurprisingly good, especially when you consider he had to do every scene with a set of comedy teeth to get his overbite to match Freddie. I realised I’ve never heard Freddie Mercury do anything but sing, so I couldn’t just whether that ripe upper class drawl was spot on, but it’s hard to believe that it wasn’t given the trouble Malek went to to get everything else right.
And the Live Aid remake is very very good. It’s not seamless, but it works, and it catches a mood. It’s the best thing in the movie, and it ruins everything else.
It doesn’t ruin everything else by comparison; it’s not that it makes everything else look terrible. It’s that the movie needs the Live Aid set to be a catharsis for the band, a moment of reunion. It needs to be Freddie getting the band back together, in one last ditch squeeze into the Live Aid line-up which will make them give everything they’ve got. Except that it really wasn’t. Pretty much like he did with every other headliner, Bob Geldof bounced Queen into the show by announcing that they’d agreed before he’d even asked them; he dared half the pop stars in the world to call him a liar and themselves a bunch of goons who didn’t care about famine, and no-one called his bluff.
And Queen weren’t broken up at this point; they were still touring and working together, though at a much slower tempo than they had been. They weren’t getting on any worse than they had been, and Live Aid was just another job of work, even if was one they knocked out of the park. In a way, that’s a much more interesting story to tell, but it doesn’t hit Hollywood story beats, so the script just makes stuff up.
There’s been any amount of blowback about the way that the movie handles Freddie’s sexuality, and I’m way underqualified to pick that apart. The one thing I will say is that I find it pretty hard to believe that Freddie Mercury didn’t have a lot more fun than the movie lets us see. It’s fun to be rich and do what you want. You can go on all you like about how empty fame can be, and what it feels like when the party’s over, but while it’s happening, it’s fun. It’s almost like they decided that showing Freddie having one wouldn’t be tragic enough, or might have been too pro-drugs or pro-something else. I dunno. But talk about making decadence look dreary ...
Finally, for the pointless cameo spotters, check out Mike Myers putting in a couple of minutes as composite clueless record producer refusing to greenlight Bohemian Rhapsody as a single because it’s not the kind of song kids will bang their heads to in their cars. If you’re going to do that, the least you can do is have him do this face straight to camera:
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