Queen, Ally and the Alchemy of Musical Stardom on the Big Screen
I
was waiting for a subway last month in Mexico City when I figured out
what’s wrong with the Queen movie. I mean, I knew what was wrong.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” is scared of tapping into the imagination that made
the band so innovative and powerfully, addictively strange. But that’s
not what hit me waiting for the subway.
The platform entertainment system was playing a concert video of
“Another One Bites the Dust.” I don’t know what year the clip was from
or what city Queen was in. I just know that the lighting is warm, the
groove is skintight (you could feel it on the platform), and that
Freddie Mercury is wearing — is packed into — white short-shorts and
almost nothing else. No shoes, no shirt yet all service. The towel he’s
whipping around gets an almost immediate, theatrical toss into the
crowd. The red wristband and red bandanna tied round his neck bring out
the red in his Montreal Canadiens trucker’s cap.
The real Freddie Mercury, mesmerizing French fans in 1984.
Mercury
does all his Mercurial moves — the side gallop, the chug-a-lug, the
duck strut, the steed swipe, the rewind, the vroom-vroom, the Wimbledon
Final frozen pirouette, the one where he kind of dries his tushy with
the microphone stand in a full march. And he does them while belting out
this uppercut of a song (with some shockingly forceful assistance from
the drummer Roger Taylor). Commuters, tourists, kids: we looked up at
this thing, mesmerized, in jeopardy of missing a train. That’s right
about when I figured out what was wrong with the Queen movie: There’s
nothing in it remotely like this.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” plods, explains, obscures, speculates and flattens. It does not mesmerize. I mean, I
wouldn’t miss a train for this. We learn how “We Will Rock You”
allegedly sprang from a fit of personal protestation. But it’s news we
can’t use. The movie won’t stop telling us things — about the music
business and the songs, about Mercury’s tortured sex life. And it fails
to show you anything close to what that clip on the subway platforms
makes you feel: sweaty.
The
musical biography has an impossibly high degree of alchemical
difficulty. One performer has to become a totally different performer,
and not any performer, just this
one star the whole world knows, and it has to be done in a way that
makes you believe you’re seeing either the impersonated star or
something quintessential about them. Val Kilmer made you believe you
were seeing something vitally true about Jim Morrison. Joaquin Phoenix
did the same with Johnny Cash. And Jamie Foxx became
Ray Charles. Angela Bassett convinced you that if you were seeing if
not Tina Turner, then Turner’s indestructibility; and Marion Cotillard,
the brittle incandescence of Edith Piaf.
For my money, one of the triumphs of this type of acting is Chadwick Boseman’s James Brown in “Get On Up.”
Boseman pumps Brown full of edginess and spite while having to
reconstruct Brown as a stage specimen, and part of that reconstruction
involves learning to lip sync to Brown. You sense that you’re watching
an actor who’s done more than homework. He’s written himself a little
dissertation. It’s not an impression of Brown. It’s an interpolation.
Some
movies pivot and omit the musical performance altogether. That’s the
approach Todd Haynes applied to Bob Dylan in “I’m Not There” and John
Ridley took in having Andre 3000 play Jimi Hendrix in “Jimi: All Is by
My Side.” But the alchemy is a reason to dislike the genre. It’s hard to
get the proportions right. It takes some work in, say, “Cadillac
Records” to figure out where Beyoncé ends and Etta James is supposed to
begin.
Rami
Malek has a different challenge in “Bohemian Rhapsody.” He’s not a
superstar playing another superstar. He just has to become the superstar
Freddie Mercury was. Just. And yet
because the movie is mostly scenes of recording sessions, squabbling
and self-pity, Mercury’s stardom is made beside the point — it’s assumed
— so Malek gets to play a charismatic sufferer, -quipster and,
eventually, proud brown gay man. It’s just that this version of Mercury
isn’t terribly exciting without the reward of seeing him vroom-vroom in
short-shorts. The movie rides the roller coaster of biographical cliché.
What’s missing are musical numbers that showcase his showmanship and
eternal capacity for self-delight.
This means more time watching Malek struggle with dental effects
meant to bring his mouth into more realistic alignment with Mercury’s.
Maybe Malek has done the best anyone could with the teeth. But they wind
up bringing something vampiric out of Mercury that I don’t know was
ever there. Either way, the alchemy is off.
In “A Star Is Born,” Lady Gaga (with Bradley Cooper) shows a lovely hesitance.
WE’RE IN A HAPPY MOMENT
for musical-movie excitement. “Mary Poppins” has returned with new
songs. And despite that lie of a title, “The Greatest Showman” is the
most impressive phenomenon nobody saw coming or took seriously once it
came. “Bohemian Rhapsody” is now the musical biopic’s biggest hit.
We can have the argument later about the difference between a classical
movie musical and a movie where people get on stage and do music, but
you could also add to the mix this latest incarnation of “A Star Is
Born,” which was a smash too.
It’s
the story of how a waitress became a Grammy winner. And because the tale
is essentially a fantasy — of love, fame and ruin; biography as
mythology — its casting is the inverse of the rock bio. A musician does
the acting. In Bradley Cooper’s version, the musician is Lady Gaga. She
starts off as Ally the restaurant grunt. But when Cooper’s beloved
alt-country pill guzzler sees her belt “La Vie en Rose” in a drag
parlor, he hauls her into stardom, which Gaga knows well.
But
the surprise of her acting comes in the first hour when the movie is
closer to earth and requires her to be more like you and me — daughter,
employee, listener. There’s a lovely hesitance to her here, not in the
camera-shy way singers tend to get when it’s time to act. Reluctance is a
performance strategy for her in this movie. Again, she’s like you and
me, she can’t believe Bradley Cooper’s happening to her, either. Some of
what’s great about the first hour is how it gets you thinking about the
kind of career Gaga could have in movies they haven’t made in, like, 30
years.
Lady Gaga with Andrew Dice Clay as her father in the movie.
The
scenes at home with Ally, her chauffeur father and his fellow drivers
are loud, funny and warm in a way that reminded me of “Moonstruck.” And
some of the pleasure I had watching Gaga in them is how she reminded me
of another singer who acts: Cher. A friend points out that she could
have Cher’s career if the movies were still interested in normal people.
I, at least, would love to see Gaga in a “Mask” or a “Suspect.”
She
and Malek are both near the top of the heap for Oscar nominations. And
she’s got an alchemical advantage over Malek’s Freddie Mercury. When
Ally’s career takes off, Gaga winds up playing a pop star not unlike
herself. And you realize she has the opposite problem that Malek does.
You’re less interested in her as a
singer — but only because we’ve seen her do huge, stadium-size
razzle-dazzle before. And yet she’s indifferent to playing the fame
stuff. It doesn’t seem to interest Ally or Gaga. If the movie loses Ally
a bit in the second half, Gaga never appears lost. She’s giving a
serious, considered, committed performance of a person she seems to
know. Malek’s commitment is to a movie committed in the wrong
proportions. It doesn’t know who it wants Freddie Mercury to be.
“Bohemian
Rhapsody” doesn’t fixate on the showmanship until the finale, which
restages their electric, legendary Live-Aid performance at Wembly
Stadium and passes for showstopping. Yet you exit hungry for a movie
that gets closer to the bottom of a man who renamed himself after both
an element and a planet. If someone dares take another crack (and
someone really should), I know the perfect Freddie. Her first name is
Lady. And her last name comes straight from a Queen song.
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