Cast: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Olivia DeJonge, Helen Thompson, Richard Roxburgh, Kelvin Harrison Jr., David Wenham, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Luke Bracey
Director: Baz Luhrmann
Writers: Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner
Musical biopics are a tricky business. It’s a popular genre with audiences so Hollywood is always going to make them, but the tried and true formula that they all follow has grown so very tedious and not even the thorough skewering served by Walk Hard was enough to slow the train down. The formula isn’t just a matter of the subjects all having lived similar lives that followed similar trajectories, there’s also the matter of getting the record labels and estates involved, which makes playing it safe a matter of necessity. An Elvis film that wishes to licence his brand and music isn’t going to get made if, for example, it wishes to interrogate the rock and roll singer’s history as a groomer (including with his wife Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge) who in reality was fourteen when he met her at age twenty-four). Such ethically muddy territory is incompatible with the formula, which profits on telling sanitised, mythological, surface-level accounts of these beloved icons and the extraordinary lives that they led. Now, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t a way to make the formula work; sure, it gave us the actively terrible Bohemian Rhapsody, but it also yielded Straight Outta Compton and Rocketman, neither of them masterpieces, but perfectly decent movies all the same. Elvis tries to mix it up to the max by enlisting perhaps the single most maximalist filmmaker working today, Baz Luhrmann.
Luhrmann, the architect of Moulin Rouge! and Romeo + Juliet, an irrepressible maestro of kitsch and glam, a director who doesn’t just ramp it up to eleven but who believes that no other volume exists; if anyone can make a rock and roll movie, it’s him. And that is what Elvis is, for better and for worse. His film hits each and every last beat of the music biopic formula but swerves through them all with such reckless abandon that they barely register as tropes. It barely even registers as a story because it never slows down for long enough to actually tell it. It’s more of an oral history, a myth of arguably the most mythical figure in all American history, the king of rock and roll himself, Elvis Aaron Presley (Austin Butler). Our storyteller, the Salieri of the film’s Amadeus-like structure, is Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks, sporting a fat suit, a heap of prosthetics, and an indecipherable accent), the man who found Elvis as a rockabilly singer in Memphis, propelled him to superstardom, and ruled his life through manipulation and exploitation up to the star’s premature death at forty-two. He’s the unambiguous villain of the story, defined solely by his incorrigible greed. What defines Elvis, as a man, an icon, a character, as whatever, is harder to say.
If bombast is what you want from an Elvis movie, it’s here in all of its orgasmic splendour. Butler takes the stage as Elvis, his hair in a quiff and pelvis thrusting in his pink suit while the ladies in the crowd scream in ecstatic delight. Luhrmann, who is allergic to shots that lost longer than three seconds, captures this with frantic energy through a camera that never stands still, cross-cutting the scenes with such rapidity so as to convey the sheer exhilaration viewers must have felt at the time seeing this pretty boy from Memphis strut his stuff. That rhythm never lets up; Elvis might well be the first two-and-a-half hour music video for how relentlessly it charges forward with montage after montage as songs, some contemporary and some anachronistic, blare in every which-way direction. There’s a very good montage early on that jumps between Elvis’ recording of his first radio hit ‘That’s All Right’ in the Sun Records studio and a childhood memory of when he first discovered the rapturous power of the blues and gospel music that influenced him. The music captivates him and seizes his soul both sensually and spiritually with a religious fervour and the film captures that sensation like a knockout punch. Imagine that but for two-and-a-half hours straight, not letting up for a second to stop as its main character rises, falls, rises again, and falls again in the space of a few minutes, and baby you’ve got Elvis.
That focus on Black music actually is a good example of both the movie’s strengths and limitations. As anyone who knows anything about rock music knows, Elvis did not invent rock and roll. He was a kid who grew up on the music of Sister Rosetta Tharpe (played in the movie by Grammy nominee Yola) and hung out on Beale Street with the likes of B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.). He recorded their songs with the rockabilly sound that was so heavily influenced by them, and people lost their minds when they realised that the guy who sang like a, well, I won’t use the word that they used back then, was in fact an all-American white kid. The movie makes plain how much Elvis owes his success and legacy to his Black precursors, and the movie treats those artists with all due reverence, but the rigidity of the music biopic formula prohibits the movie from delving any deeper into the politics of his appropriation or what it really meant to be a white guy popularising Black music and culture at such a conservative place and time. Not only does this make for a less interesting story, it makes for a less interesting character. Elvis is lent little agency in his meteoric rise, he’s more of a Forrest Gump; things just happen to him and he has little to say in turn.
Speaking of Gump, Hanks is really something else here. As universally beloved an actor as any working today, this is the very definition of casting someone against type and while you can kind of see what Hanks is going for if you squint a bit, it just doesn’t work. Caked with make-up that inhibits his facial expressiveness and saddled with a script that fails to grant his character any real interiority, Hanks just looks and acts like an evil alien. There’s entertainment value in that, sure, but the arc that they’re trying to build of a vile, conniving huckster who milked every last drop he could out of his cash cow falls flat. Butler for his part delivers what is by all means a terrific impression. The cadences of his voice, the way he wears those suits, his movements on the stage, they’re all spot on. But there’s a sense of personhood missing, an essence, a spark. Butler looks and sounds uncannily like the man, but he doesn’t get that twinkle in his eye, that brightness in his smile (in fact, I’m not sure his sullen Elvis smiles even once). Towards the end, the movie cuts between footage of Butler and the real Elvis singing what would be his final performance, and it’s as clear as night and day how much more of a naturally charismatic performer the real guy was. It’s a thankless job trying to portray such a famous icon and Butler’s is a creditable effort, but what he submits is simply the hologram for Luhrmann’s whirlwind Elvis show. If that’s what you want from your Elvis movie, then God’s speed.
★★★
Aled Warren Films 