Why Is ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ The Award-Season Movie People Love to Hate?

Sunday night’s Golden Globe wins for the Queen/Freddie Mercury bio-pic Bohemian Rhapsody didn’t happen until very late in the telecast. The movie only had two nominations, so it was pretty much out of sight, out of mind until the final two awards of the night, which were Best Actor in a Drama — won by Rami Malek for his performance as Mercury — and Best Picture, Drama. The reaction online was swift and decisive. And PISSED.

Suddenly, a Golden Globes that had been full of good vibes and wins for the likes of Sandra Oh, Regina King, and Ben Whishaw (not to mention Jeff Bridges’s exuberantly semi-comprehensible acceptance of the Cecil B. DeMille award) was plunged into deepest darkness. The Best Picture wins for Bohemian Rhapsody and also Green Book, the feel-good story about a white driver who learns to appreciate and befriend a world-class black pianist, were a pox on an evening where films like A Star Is Born, BlacKkKlansman, Black Panther, The Favourite, and If Beale Street Could Talk were either shut out or relegated to other awards. The loud and enthusiastic response within the Beverly Hilton ballroom to the two Bohemian Rhapsody wins had no kind of reflection on film Twitter, where even the sweetest and most unassuming weren’t safe — like Eighth Grade star, and Globe nominee, Elsie Fisher, who was inundated with clap-backs after she tweeted her congratulations to Malek and his film.

On some level this happens every year. Critical faves get slapped down when the votes go to less discerning/more populist award voters, which is another way of saying that different people have different taste, and since Twitter is an engine for turning everyday disappointment into towering grievance, post-award show time is an angry time just as a rule.

But with Bohemian Rhapsody, it’s a different flavor. People are legitimately mad at the film for what they see as very legitimate reasons, and right now, they’re running head-first into the brick wall of realization that the rest of the moviegoing country appears to have LOVED this movie. Sitting at #13 on the year for domestic box office for 2018, the film is poised to top $200 million. Its Cinemascore, which is meant to judge audience satisfaction after they see the film, is a pristine “A.”

And while critics may not hate Bohemian Rhapsody as much as they hated, say, Gotti, it’s still far more disliked than most awards contenders ever get to be. For as much as people like to stoke a critics-versus-“regular” people narrative, generally speaking, even the most populist award-winners are loved by critics. The most middlebrow Oscar winners that get bitched about constantly? The King’s Speech (which beat The Social Network) was 95% on Rotten Tomatoes. The Artist? 95%. Slumdog Millionaire and Birdman? Both 91%. Even Crash, the bane of many Oscar-watchers’ existence, holds a 74% fresh rating. Bohemian Rhapsody sits at 62% on RT, which still counts as fresh, but which would rank it as the worst-reviewed Best Picture nominee since Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. With the exception of that movie, no other Best Picture nominee scores that low until you go back to Chocolat in 2000.

But 62% fresh doesn’t explain the pitched tenor of the anger out there towards Bohemian Rhapsody. To explain that, you have to look in a few directions.

Biopic Fatigue Has Become Biopic Frustration

This is the mildest of the reasons, but I do think it’s at the root of one of the other ones. Biopics tend to flatten out the lives of their subjects and funnel them through a verrrry familiar formula in order to turn the messy and complicated lives of real people into the familiar arcs of a story that audiences can love. Bohemian Rhapsody is a huge offender in this area, and as a result, the life of Freddie Mercury is presented as a familiar arc of talent, beset by demons, nearly destroyed by excess, and ultimately redeemed by that same talent plus the love of his friends, lovers, family, and especially bandmates. Critics — and I realize i’m speaking in very broad generalizations here, ironically enough — can’t stand biopics for this. They’re formulaic and safe and don’t allow the audience to sit with any kind of messy resolutions. Audiences (again, generalizing here) love these stories because of their familiarity. Queen is a band they love, and seeing their story rendered in a way that makes sense based on the decades of other movies exactly like this adds up to a feel-good movie, even though it’s about a musician who ended up dying of AIDS. Bohemian Rhapsody ends in a way that allows Freddie Mercury’s music to triumph, and that’s why the people who love it, love it.

Accusations of Homophobia

That flattening and formula that allows Freddie’s music to triumph, however, also allows Freddie’s bisexuality to — for a good chunk of this movie — stand in for the kind of excess that plays the villain in movies like these. Which makes it very easy to fit Bohemian Rhapsody for the black hat of homophobia. It doesn’t help that the shortcuts and factual inaccuracies that beset all biopics here come across like queer erasure. In a movie that already casts rampant gay sex as the path to destruction (and ultimately death), it’s hard to ask for the benefit of the doubt when the movie, say, switches up the order of when Freddie told his bandmates he had AIDS. By hewing so closely to the biopic formula, Bohemian Rhapsody leaves itself open to every possible critique from gay audiences/critics, from demonizing sexuality to making a movie about a queer icon in a way that is clearly intended for a straight audience. Which is doubly ironic considering it comes from a gay filmmaker. Which leads us to the big one…

The Bryan Singer Factor

This is the biggest source of anger, yet the one that must be most vaguely articulated. Since long before the Kevin Spacey accusations emerged, there has been persistent talk about a giant #MeToo bombshell waiting to drop on Bryan Singer, who was accused in a 2014 civil lawsuit of drugging and raping a minor; though the lawsuit was later withdrawn. In December of 2017, in the wake of the Kevin Spacey news, Singer was accused of the 2003 rape of a 17-year-old boy on a yacht in Washington state. If the Spacey revelation was met with a chorus of unsurprised voices who’d all heard the whispers and rumors about his bad behavior for years, that may well go double for Singer.

Singer’s behavior on the set of Bohemian Rhapsody was more a matter of public record, in that Singer was fired as director mid-way through production — after reportedly not showing up to set and clashing with star Rami Malek — and replaced with Dexter Fletcher. Neither Singer nor Fletcher were thanked in the Best Picture acceptance speech by producer Graham King, though Singer took the moment to thank the Hollywood Foreign Press on Instagram.

All of which is to say that the enmity out there for Bohemian Rhapsody is a snowball that is both about and not about the specific quality of the film itself. It takes a movie that many critics think is bad — and bad in ways that feel particularly insidious towards the life and queer legacy of Freddie Mercury — and ties it to a filmmaker who, given the myriad accusations against him now and whatever may emerge in the future, absolutely no one is looking to see get honored.

The Oscar nominations are announced January 22. The 91st Academy Awards aren’t until February 24. Which means that whatever is yet to come out about Bryan Singer, however we end up litigating the problems with the queer aspects of the film, the Golden Globe victories last night have pretty well ensured that we’re going to be talking about Bohemian Rhapsody right through until Oscar night. Don’t stop yourselves now.