103 - Rhapsody

The question is; if you're making a movie based on a true story, how close to the truth should you be? Clearly it is absolutely impossible for every single detail of a movie to be exactly as it was, as there's no way of knowing exactly what is said, or exactly what happens, behind closed doors.

So, some licence has to be taken; especially if you're trying to condense many years of life in to a two hour movie. Events are often abbreviated, or conflated, or simplified, to give the essence of what went on, rather than ensure that every single precise historical detail is there. After all, it's a movie, not a documentary. 

To my mind, however, the line that shouldn't be crossed is blatantly making things up 

One more recent film that's guilty of this is the Queen biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody. The thing is, it doesn't need to do this. The performances in it, and the strength of the characters is such that it has no real need to make things up. But it does. 

(I'll gloss over here the fact that the movie absolutely, and massively tones down various elements of Freddie's life; particularly his love life. If Freddie's real life was turned up to 11, here it's about a 4...)

Certainly there's simplification, and conflation going on in the earlier parts of the movie, and some songs aren't in the right order, which is mall potatoes, really; but the closer it gets to the stunning Live Aid climax, the more stuff they make up. 

The movie makes great play of the band getting in a huff, and coming close to splitting for good when Freddie goes off and does his solo album. Mr Bad Guy, with other members of the band whinging that him going off and doing this solo album is almost treasonous. This is despite the fact that other member of the band - Brian May, and Roger Taylor - had both done records away from Queen before this.

Then there's the band's initial reluctance to do Live Aid; the film has them wary because they've not played live for such a long time (due to the fictional huff the band had with Freddie...). Whereas in real life, the opposite was true; they were worried they were burnt out as they'd been playing live so much. January 1985 they'd played to 300,000 people in Rio, and then been touring April-May of that year. 

And there's Freddie's AIDS diagnosis; reports vary as to when he was diagnosed, but it wasn't until 1986-87, and he didn't tell his bandmates for a couple of years (though they may have had their suspicions), not just before the Live Aid appearance. 

These manglings of the truth took me out of the film somewhat; and the script could so easily have been re-written to be closer to the truth. You could have had the band feeling burnt out. Getting in to rows over this. The drama is there. You don't need to make stuff up. You also could have had Freddie getting worried about AIDS; starting to make the connections. That could have had just as much impact as what we had. But I guess they wanted the moment where Freddie tells his bandmates as a part of the film, and as they'd made the choice to end on the Live Aid performance (and don't you wish the movie had the whole thing; it cuts two songs) they had to shoehorn it in somewhere. But it's an un-necessary addition, and as noted it takes you out of the film if you have any knowledge of what really happened. 

I imagine many who watched it just weren't bothered by any of this; if you don't know the story, you'll probably not care. I guess that's fine. There's probably other movies I've seen where I've not known the subject and everything's seemed fine to me... and somewhere there's someone who's had a rant just like me. 

Oh, well...