Writer and director Baz Luhrman (Moulin Rouge!, The Great Gatsby) gives us his take on the life and legacy of Elvis Pressley.
What’s It About?
Elvis (2022) takes all the typical biopic twists and turns. You witness Elvis’ childhood, meteoric rise, career road bumps, and comeback. The twist is that it is told through the eyes and narration of Elvis’ manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks).
The Colonel is as crooked as managers come, and you can sense his sliminess from the moment he shows up on the screen. However, he sinks his teeth into a young Elvis (Austin Butler) and manipulates Elvis and his family for his entire career. Elvis’ initial innocence and desire for a present father figure cloud his judgment about the Colonel’s grift.
The story is a constant conflict between Elvis’ artistic wishes and the Colonel wanting to go in directions that would maximize profit. Elvis second-guesses the Colonel more as he gets older, but the Colonel can always win him back to his side. So, you watch Elvis’ career soar but wonder what could have been if he had the freedom to pursue music the way he wanted.
My Reaction
Austin Butler is fantastic as Elvis. He may be the best biopic casting choice since Jamie Fox in Ray. You believe that he is the living, breathing, performing Elvis. It is too bad that he wasn’t in a more ambitious film.
Throughout the film, Tom Hanks brings his dramatic chops to the table, creating mistrust and contempt for the Colonel. This role is against type for Hanks, and his ability to elicit those emotions from the audience is commendable. He is aided by makeup and prosthetics, as I am unsure if he would be able to pull this off just looking like the Tom Hanks that we all know and love. As good as Hanks is, I must say that I have no idea what accent he is trying to perform.
You either love or hate Luhrman’s visual storytelling style. I am of the latter. Each scene is heavily layered with quick cuts, lens flares, musical score, and song. All these distractions happen when you want to focus on the dialogue, making it almost impossible to build a connection with the characters. The prevalence of all this audio and visual noise during the first 30 minutes of the film made me want to walk out. Luhrman does pull back on this technique later in the movie. But by that point, I was already flustered by the experience.
I also question whom Luhrman had on set to advise him on how to shoot scenes with Black people. Many scenes with African Americans in Memphis ranged from comical to insulting. The depiction of the African Americans at the tent revival made caricatures of Black people adjacent to blackface.
Luhrman’s attempt at creating parallels between gospel music and the blues during that scene was as clumsy as they come. There is nothing uplifting about the portrayal of Black people at the beginning of this film. I am confident that is the opposite of what Luhrman thought he was doing.
Even later, there is an attempt to sanitize Elvis’ relationship with Black people and Black music. Yes, Elvis had African American artists as friends, but that does not erase the number of artists that claims that he outright stole their music.
This gets to the movie’s biggest flaw, the sanitization of Elvis’ legacy. Luhrman paints Elvis as a prolific, misunderstood, and sympathetic character, taken advantage of by his manager. Although the Colonel most assuredly conned Elvis, the rest of his legacy is more complicated.
Overall Rating
Elvis does not attempt to be authentic to the complexity of the man. Instead of exploring his complicated relationship with Black artists, it uses the great B.B. King to explain away his use of Black music. The movie shows his womanizing but fails to hint at how many of these women were underage.
There is no way that his estate would ever greenlight a movie that tackles any of these issues. So instead, we get a whitewashed version of Elvis that rings hallow. Maybe that is the problem with making biopics today. Hollywood can no longer make a biopic that puts these figures on mythical pedestals while erasing the darker elements of their lives. Not only does it ring inauthentic, but it makes the film predictable and dull. Sure, there is an audience that would love to tune out and celebrate the clean version of historical figures. But I would surmise that audience is dwindling.
