Love & Mercy, a superb fictional portrait of Brian Wilson, the presiding genius behind the Beach Boys, was released a few years ago to glowing reviews—and it did no business whatsoever. A few weeks before the release of Bohemian Rhapsody on November 2, someone I know in the entertainment business told me the “tracking” on the movie—a measurement of advance excitement that helps predict ticket sales—was surprisingly strong. People really wanted to see this biopic about Freddie Mercury, the golden-throated lead singer of the band Queen.
Like Wilson, Mercury lived a troubled life; unlike Wilson, who found a measure of personal peace and domestic contentment after decades of psychosis, Mercury died at age 45 of AIDS. Love & Mercy has a happy ending. Bohemian Rhapsody does not. The Beach Boys are a far more revered band than Queen in the annals of pop culture, and Brian Wilson wrote many more classic songs than Mercury. But nobody wanted to see Love & Mercy. By contrast, Bohemian Rhapsody grossed a jaw-dropping $51 million in its first weekend—19 percent more than did A Star Is Born, which was considered a wild triumph at the box office. What gives?
Bohemian Rhapsody is a completely pat, old-fashioned celebrity biopic about an alienated kid who joins a band, battles uncomprehending producers and critics, becomes a huge star, does a lot of drugs, is manipulated by a Machiavellian manager, breaks up the band, does more drugs, realizes his manager is bad, gets back together with the band, finds out he’s dying, and performs One Last Great Gig. If you haven’t seen it all before, you haven’t been much of a moviegoer.
It was entirely clear from the trailers that this was the kind of movie you’d get if you went to Bohemian Rhapsody. And it turns out it’s exactly the kind of movie people want to see when they go to see a movie about a pop star: rags to riches, gets too big for his britches, suffers a fall, realizes he had it all, makes it right, goes into the great good night.
By contrast, Love & Mercy is an innovative and original film that depicts Wilson’s descent into madness as he tries and fails to produce an LP masterpiece called Smile—and then takes up his story 25 years later as the middle-aged Wilson falls in love with a tough and resourceful woman who runs afoul of his horrendously controlling therapist, Eugene Landy. Director Bill Pohlad’s most brilliant touch was casting two actors to play Wilson (Paul Dano as the young genius and John Cusack as the middle-aged boy-child).
There was nothing pat about Love & Mercy, and maybe that’s why it did so poorly. It was too fancy. It was too subtle. It was too artistic. People just want to listen to the music and watch the dancing, and there’s plenty of both in Bohemian Rhapsody, which features a riveting central performance from the TV actor Rami Malek (of Mr. Robot), who’s so good that after a while you forget the unfortunate prosthetic teeth that make him look less like Freddie Mercury and more like Freddie “the Impaler” Dracula.
I think people wanted to see Bohemian Rhapsody not because they worship or revere Mercury or Queen but because they’ve grown very, very fond of them over the years. Their songs and videos were and are cute, silly, wacky, and giddy, often to the point of stupidity. Queen was, in many ways, the last gasp of camp. Certainly the band’s very name was a camp joke commenting on Mercury’s mincing personal style, which he undercut with a commanding musical intensity so powerful it could have vibrated right off Luciano Pavarotti’s vocal cords.
Over the decades, Queen’s songs have come to be beloved in a way no other 1970s Brit-pop band’s are because their silliness turned into timelessness. Queen and Mercury are purely lovable now, especially since Mercury’s untimely passing in 1991 has frozen him in our memories.
The movie is remarkably and disappointingly free of the playful quality that made Queen singular. Its Freddie is a sad and tortured case, rather than a whip-smart singer-songwriter who understood his great contribution to pop music would come from work that was delightful rather than meaningful.
You want to see a great movie about a pop icon, stream Love & Mercy. But you probably won’t. And you probably will see Bohemian Rhapsody. So much for originality.
