First, a grain of salt before I serve the meal: I don't often like biopic movies. It's the expansive cradle-to-grave type films that truly bore me, though, and Bohemian Rhapsody is not that -- it narrows focus to a roughly 15-year period from the formation of the band to its performance at the 1985 Live Aid concert. In doing so, it steers clear of some of the tropes that make many fawning biopics so dull. But not all of them.
My real issue with most biopics is that they often lack a compelling arc of narrative, character, or both. With fiction, there's usually a reason for the story, a thesis statement (overt or obscure) about people in general, or one person in particular -- something illuminating about the human condition. I don't mean to suggest this must always be profound or formal. You'll rarely find a message that's novel or unexplored by countless stories told before. To me, it's more the spine within the tale that made it worth the telling. Biopics are often just a collection of scattered events from the life of their subject, failing to add up to much.
Bohemian Rhapsody doesn't totally fall into this
trap, but neither does it completely avoid it. Sprinkled in throughout
the two-hour and 14 minutes movie, repeated phrases do illuminate what
seems to be the intended "grand unified theory" of Queen -- they're a
found family. They're outcasts, making music for outcasts. But this
statement is sporadic, dropped in occasionally out of some sense of
dramatic obligation, and not truly essential to most of the events
depicted.
You
might believe that the lack of cohesion here is because the movie is
based on true events: life isn't always neat, so don't expect a story
taken from life to be orderly. But the thing is, Bohemian Rhapsody is
more than willing to play fast and loose with the facts. It suggests an
early lack of self-confidence by Freddie Mercury his friends say he
never had, invents a nay-saying producer character (played by Mike
Myers) that reportedly never existed, depicts a break-up of the band
that never happened, and advances by years the moment Mercury received
his AIDS diagnosis. I'm open to taking dramatic license with
true events to tell a good story -- I just think the changes ought to
actually add up to a good story. The inventions of this movie create
moments of drama, but that's all they are: moments that don't quite fit
into a narrative whole.
That
said, many of the moments do work on their own. Particularly strong are
the final 15 minutes, when Bohemian Rhapsody basically becomes a
concert movie depicting Queen's 1985 Live Aid performance. It's
energetic, uplifting, and exciting, conveying many of the emotions you
feel when you actually go to a particularly great concert. The
performances have good energy throughout the film too. Obviously, Rami
Malek won an Oscar here for playing Mercury (despite not doing his own
singing), but I think the actors playing the other members of the band (Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy, and Joe Mazzello) are similarly invested -- they just aren't given enough to do to really shine.
Bohemian
Rhapsody became notorious for the firing of its controversial director
Bryan Singer, who was replaced by Dexter Fletcher. The movie does feel
like it has one authorial hand, but I feel this is achieved by
hyperactive editing that makes any schizophrenic shifts in tone look
intentional. There are multiple times in the film where dialog scenes
are given the action movie treatment, with rapid cuts of half-second
shots that call too much attention to themselves and threaten dizziness.
This actually won a Best Film Editing Oscar for these efforts, I
suppose in recognition of how one unified film was created from material
shot by two directors... but I found the cutting distracting. The
stronger moments in the film utilize longer, more considered camera
takes.
No comments:
Post a Comment