With the Elvis biopic coming out this summer, I decided to take a trip down memory lane to the other two recent biopics of superstars of the music scene: Rocketman and Bohemian Rhapsody. The 2019 Elton John film has been one of my favourites since I first saw it, even though I wasn’t a massive Elton John fan then. I hadn’t seen all of Bohemian Rhapsody until recently when I decided to finally finish this film I’d only seen half of two years ago. I didn’t like what I saw then, but I felt I owed it to the film to finish it.
This article will contain spoilers for both films, as well as brief mentions of addiction and abuse. I’d also like to note that when talking about any film of this sort, I am talking about the characters rather than the real people.
The main difference between the two films is a simple case of ‘show vs tell’: Where Rocketman unfolds its emotional core through performance, dialogue, and design, Bohemian Rhapsody repeatedly tells the audience what it wants them to take away. The phrase “we’re a family” and variations thereof are said several times, hammering home the point that Queen and their fans were one big family. This would be only a slight nuisance if the film supported this statement, but it doesn’t. There is barely a moment where the band acts as friends, let alone a family, and in no way does the film show them having a special kind of relationship with their fans.
Rocketman doesn’t have to tell the audience in direct words how important Bernie Taupin is to Elton and the impact of his other relationships. Elton’s relationships with others and himself are the emotional core of the film. And like any good film, it doesn’t need to tell the audience, instead working to show it through the story itself and trusting the audience to understand. It’s a film primarily about Elton John but it shows how much he is shaped by other people. Every character, including Elton himself, is a complex mosaic of good and bad traits, some more one than the other. They reflect the nuances of real people.
Bohemian Rhapsody seems to insist that this is a film about Queen, about the band as a family, but it’s really a film about Freddie Mercury. His bandmates are secondary characters at best, existing mostly to suffer his antics. Every character in this seems one-dimensional and flat. I care deeply about Freddie Mercury the person, but Freddie Mercury the character is flat at best and unlikeable at worst. He comes across as a deeply selfish and unkind person who has little regard for anyone’s feelings or the consequences of his actions. And because the film fails to set up any likeable qualities of the character, the viewer is left to wonder why on Earth anyone bothers with him. “We’re a family,” they tell the audience, but the words ring hollow and untrue.
Many of the failures of Bohemian Rhapsody can be attributed to the behind-the-scenes disaster of changing directors when most of the film was already shot. Hiring a new director and tasking him with making a film out of someone else’s work is bound to have a subpar result. Bohemian Rhapsody was at times insufferable to watch (cue the atrociously edited scene of Queen meeting John Reid) and I don’t doubt that this issue contributed massively.
But Bohemian Rhapsody’s biggest failure, in my opinion, is that it is a badly told story featuring characters the viewer has no reason to like. Because the narrative relies heavily on nostalgia rather than storytelling, I did not feel compelled by its story at all. And to top it all off, the film finishes with a shot-for-shot recreation of Queen’s famous LiveAid concert - which was 20 minutes long. This scene throws what little Bohemian Rhapsody had going for it under the bus by being excruciatingly long, serving no narrative purpose, and failing even at evoking any emotion.
Rocketman takes an opposite route to Bohemian Rhapsody when it comes to storytelling and narrative. Its first major win is to make the film a musical fantasy rather than a straight biopic: It’s magical and yet feels so much more grounded because it appeals to the audience’s emotions rather than pure nostalgia. The songs are tied into the narrative, featuring incredible choreography by Adam Murray. This aspect of the film is particularly effective because the songs are performed by the actors. Rather than using the Elton John originals, it is Taron Egerton (and occasionally others) who sings the songs which are often slightly changed to fit the film’s narrative. This gives Rocketman a unique character and helps to keep it grounded in its story. Plus, Taron Egerton is a phenomenal performer. For every song on the Rocketman soundtrack, I can tell you exactly which scene it belongs to, what the characters are going through, and what I felt when watching it.
Another defining feature of Rocketman’s success and Bohemian Rhapsody’s failure is the maturity of the content. Rocketman took many years to be made because its creators stuck to their principles. Nothing is edited and censored for the comfort of the audience, particularly those who are bigoted against queer people and addicts. It’s messy, vulgar, and ultimately extremely human and relatable. It features all the ups and downs of life and leaves nothing out. There is no sugarcoating of the addiction, the abuse, or the struggle with sexuality, but there is also unrestrained joy and love - in particular, gay joy. In 2019, Rocketman was the first film by a major motion picture studio to feature a gay sex scene.
Bohemian Rhapsody fails to hit any of these emotional beats. It scrubs everything clean - the lifestyle, the rock n roll, the substance abuse, but most importantly the queerness. If you made the same film about a straight person, it would barely be any different. Throughout the film we see him kiss a man once, maybe twice, and although there’s a scene of him at a queer nightclub, it seems out of place. Every aspect of his queerness feels like a caricature, not like something that is a part of him as a person and character.
Ultimately, it seems the downfall of Bohemian Rhapsody was producers, executives, and the studio. It’s a shame because I believe somewhere hidden under its messes, there’s a great film. The actors did a good job with what little they were given to work with. A Queen or Freddie Mercury biopic has immense potential to be an artistic masterpiece but what happened here made it a dime-a-dozen, audience pandering movie. Nothing about it feels genuine, even though it is the more historically accurate of the two films.
I hope Baz Luhrmann took the same path as Rocketman with Elvis. I would rather have a great and interesting film than a straightforward and accurate biopic. In the end, people have different tastes, but to me, Bohemian Rhapsody feels empty whereas Rocketman fills me with joy and heartache, and I hope more studios decide to support the heartache kind of film.
Images: Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox
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