BoRhap Horseman

I saw Bohemian Rhapsody tonight. I had been avoiding it. The problems with both the script and the set were widely reported. Sacha Baron Cohen was supposed to play Mercury but quit the production. Then Rami Malek had director Bryan Singer fired during production. (Dexter Fletcher finished the shoot. Also, how is Bryan Singer still even working? Spacey fell hard but Singer is still around? Really?) Then BoRhap got terrible reviews. I thought the whole thing was sort of a train wreck. I don't usually like train wrecks. I don't even get pleasure out of watching things that people say are so bad they're good. So I was prepared to look away.

But then BoRhap became the most popular musical biopic of all time and made a ton of money and it became clear that Rami Malek is almost definitely getting a Best Actor nomination. Since I usually gamble on these sorts of things and try to pre-game these movies, I figured after the SAG nominations that I had to see BoRhap. It's almost certainly getting a best actor nomination, and it may also get nominations in sound mixing and costume design. It might even deserve those last two nominations.

It's worth saying, too, that I loved Ben Hardy in this movie. He plays Queen's drummer, Roger Taylor, and he's excellent.

The thing about BoRhap is that there's just not much to it. That's sort of odd to say for a movie that is 2 hours and 14 minutes, but there simply is not much of a plot: Queen gets famous and then... Queen stays famous. To be fair, most of the film is actually about Freddie Mercury and his weird relationship with his girlfriend–fiancée Mary. There are two very long scenes where Queen fights with a record producer about whether or not "Bohemian Rhapsody" is a good song. These pass for plot as well as for conflict in Anthony McCarten's screenplay, and I have to say that even though these scenes don't work, they do give the movie a kind of structure on which to hang a story.

Ben Hardy as Roger Taylor

The screenplay itself is pretty terrible. Just as one example, there's this really clunky sequence where Mercury's dad explains that their family is of Parsi heritage and, like, basically reads a little Wikipedia summary of Parsi ethnicity. The rest of it is your typical rock-star drama. Lead singer becomes too big for the band, turns to drugs and sex and easy living (more on this in a moment), and deserts his faithful brothers in the band who have been nothing but loyal. But then! He learns his lesson and comes crawling back. Humbled, he asks for forgiveness and his band forgives him. Then they give a reunion performance and everyone cries. You've seen this before. We all have. And here's a drinking game: take a shot every time a member of Queen says "we're a family".

But... and here is where we really run into trouble – at least for this viewer – BoRhap has a great deal of trouble dealing with Mercury's sexuality. BoRhap is rated PG-13. It's about 1970s rock stars and it is rated PG-13. This creates a very serious problem. The band doesn't do any hard drugs in this movie. Instead they drink a lot, pop a pill every once in a while, Roger Taylor has sex with multiple women, and Freddie Mercury... fucks guys on the sly. Well, he looks at them, anyway, and attends a lot of parties where other guys make out.

The villain swoops in

Homosexuality, however, is central to this movie. Since drugs or sex can't really be the obstacle that draws Mercury away from his band and his girlfriend, what the screenwriter instead has done is move homosexuality tout court into that role. So, there is this underlying force that threatens Queen at all points throughout the movie, and that threat is homosexuality – first in an inchoate form and then in the form of BoRhap's antagonist, Paul, who is, as far as this film is concerned, evil incarnate. Paul is the descendant of those old school gay vampires in Hollywood movies made in the 1940s and '50s, feeding off of Freddie and destroying him; he's a figure of two-dimensional homosexual predation. Queer desire is presented as illicit, troubling, seedy, and dangerous from its first introduction in the film. And BoRhap maintains this association throughout. Homosexuality is what disrupts Freddie and Mary's relationship; homosexuality breaks up Freddie and Queen; Freddie's homosexuality is the way the film indicates his lassitude and depression; and homosexuality is what finally kills Freddie. Homosexuality is structurally the film's villain: it is a haunting force that Freddie can't quit and that eventually destroys him. BoRhap goes so far as to present homosexuality as something separate from Freddie, like a terrible addiction. It's as though Freddie isn't gay, it's just that he struggles with being gay and is troubled by his sexuality, which torments him and won't let him alone.

Rami is as curious as I am

Now, this very well may be the way Mercury experienced his own sexuality – how should I know how he experienced it? – but the thing that bothers me is that this becomes the structure of the film, which uses homosexuality as the film's central obstacle and makes homosexuality itself into BoRhap's villainous force. I found this outrageously homophobic.

Still, Queen's music is great. And Malek has Mercury's physicality down perfectly. As boring (and offensive) as I thought the screenplay was, all the concert stuff is pure pleasure. It's impossible for me to be annoyed with great concert footage or shots of audiences singing along and loving their lives. (The middle-aged woman next to me in the theatre who alternated between checking her phone and singing along, seemed to me to feel the same way. She was there for the karaoke. The dialogue? Not so much.)

And it's hard not to think of "We Are the Champions" as a gay anthem, and despite the film's homophobia, the song still feels like that in act three when it appears in BoRhap. The direction even helps with that feeling a little.

Weirdly, in other words, even though the film is, on the one hand, homophobic, it also can't help but celebrate queerness as a lifestyle or as a performance. Mercury is flamboyant, outrageous, and, well... queeny, and if BoRhap tries to say that gay sex is bad, it still maintains a love for gay style. Bohemian Rhapsody celebrates that, at least, and there is definitely something to love in that celebration.