Elvis

dir: Baz Luhrmann

2022

I would say I’m in two minds about this flick, but that wouldn’t strictly be true. This is a Barry Luhrmann film after all.

His films, at their best, are hysterical, over-edited monstrosities where performances take a distant back seat to hyper-editing and high energy sequences that try to obscure the vast emptiness underneath. All the great costuming and set design, all the impassioned, arch performances are thrown into a blender and shattered into a perplexing array of disparate shards, and then poured out through a firehose onto an unsuspecting and unwilling audience.

That’s overstating things, surely. He has birthed one utter monstrosity into this world, being the film that summarised Australia called, um, Australia, which is so terrible that around its release it resulted in a massive shortage in negative adjective descriptors, because they were all used up in describing the sheer multitude of ways in which it achieved peak terribleness.

And I guess Romeo & Juliet and Moulin Rouge have their fans. Great Gatsby doesn’t have any fans and sleeps very much alone, but is almost worth it entirely for that great shot of DiCaprio raising that champagne glass to the peak crescendo moment scored with George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

It’s an insane, overdone, peak cheesy moment done to perfection. Luhrmann has always been better suited to film clips and laundry detergent commercials than he ever could be at long form movies.

What is a movie, anyway? Is it a collection of moments strung together thematically to both highlight individual moments but also deliver an overarching flow that’s meant to congeal in our brains as everything connects together, leaving us with some lasting impressions and feelings about people and places?

This Elvis film, for the most part, is incapable of doing that. It does not want to tell a coherent story about Elvis’s life or about what made Elvis a phenomenon. Only a fool watches a Luhrmann film wanting a coherent anything about anything.

There is a unifying, over-arching connector throughout all of this (it’s over two and a half hours long), but unfortunately that’s part of what makes it such a fucking disjointed slog to get through – the terrible narration of Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks, ugh), telling us Elvis’s story through the lens of when Colonel Parker started exploiting the poor boy in the 1950s, through to the poor boy’s death in the 70s at the age of 42.

I say “boy” because now that age seems awfully young. Back when I was a kid, well, 42 might as well have been 142, and he seemed like an ancient Roman emperor, dead from centuries of excess.

But now I see him as the poor kid that he was, tricked by his own desire to matter to the world, to be loved by millions, fooled by a conman who never stopped conning him or exploiting that desire, and the insecurity that came with it.

The flick gives us the elements of his history without allowing many of them to make sense, and then uses others to really cover over the fact that Luhrmann is really uncomfortable when people are just talking calmly about stuff without high drama.

He can’t stand it. He seems like the kind of person who would smash a vase if it ever got too quiet in the room.

I don’t know if anything is true in this film, or accurate in terms of when things happened. I know that there was a guy called Elvis. But I thought he was a short, bespectacled guy from London whose real name was Declan MacManus, who had a few nice songs.

But this Elvis, born in Tupelo, Mississippi and played by Austin Butler, apparently was gifted to us upon this world as an avatar from the gods themselves. And into him they poured all their love, all their beauty, and all their lust, and an insatiable desire to fuck everything and everyone, mostly through music, but also in the more obvious way.

To do this the young Elvis had to be exposed to a bunch of stuff – religious ecstasy (gospel), dancers bumping and grinding (blues) and country & poverty (the white varietal), and with all this distilled in the most potent of mixes, like moonshine, he found himself in a position where he could, according to both his supporters and critics, produce palatable “black” music for “white” consumers, and not just for the Southern states.

I…don’t know what to make of this argument.

I’ve long known (I mean, the song came out over thirty years ago, but I’ve never forgotten that “Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me, straight up racist, the sucker was simple and plain, fuck him and John Wayne!” from Public Enemy’s Fight the Power. And it’s not only because I was young and impressionable, and easily impressed by songs with swearing in them at that young, tender age.

Putting all of everything else aside, all I’m saying is that at a point in my teens, I realised that Elvis wasn’t actually held in universal esteem, that at least some people thought he was less than wonderful. That confused me, because up to that point, he was that guy who was in cheesy but enjoyable movies I occasionally watched on rainy Saturday afternoons on the telly, who seemed like he was charming and could sing, too. I probably watched Viva Las Vegas, Blue Hawaii and Clambake dozens of times, amongst many others, and whose songs were universally known and loved.

Not that I “loved” his music, it’s just that it was everywhere. But once I heard that at least some members of the African-American community felt that Elvis stole their music and profited from it, I had to think “huh”.

How does this flick side-step around this thorny briar patch? By making this Elvis an unequivocal adorer of Black music and Black People in all their multitudinous forms and making him incredibly respectful of African-American performers, like Arthur Crudup, Big Mama Thornton and Sister Rosetta Tharpe ,including a clear friendship with a very young B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jnr). I have no idea whether any or all of this is whitewashing, whether he actually cared when Martin Luther King Jnr was assassinated, or whether he was Southern white trash racist like a lot of his family are depicted. All I know is that the Elvis in this flick isn’t straight out racist.

I can’t reconcile the accusations because I don’t know the truth. It’s not fair to say that I don’t care, because racism is a monstrous evil, and making allowances or giving passes to racists past and present just reinforces and excuses the same old bullshit. I just don’t know if this film is the battlefield upon which that battle is best fought.

What is clear is that to some unscrupulous jerks, like the awful Colonel, Elvis is a perfect conduit towards extracting money from the pockets of white teenagers by selling them “black”, in other words, songs they don’t have to pay for the rights to, music. And that’s known as making new money for old rope.

And Elvis, who only wants enough money to make sure his parents don’t end up in poverty again, isn’t really focused on that. But he’s not without wants.

The Elvis here wants to do something to music, and to crowds, that they’ll never forget. How it’s edited, how it’s put together, for brief moments, in between the delirious overediting, occasionally reaches for the divine. There is an edit, accompanied by a camera movement, when he hits two chords on Heartbreak Hotel which is shocking, and kinda genius. There are several moments like it in the film, several around the hundreds and hundreds of non-sublime moments, but many of those moments on stage, do truly transcend something. As does the star at the centre of the movie.

They’re implied as originating both from what he’s seen in the blues shacks and juke joints, but also from his own nervousness on being the frontman on stage, but the audiences (girls in the crowd, and some gentle chaps) are shown as responding physically, powerfully, and almost completely against their will when they see his hips and legs in action. It even works through the camera to the audiences watching at home, many of whom are overwhelmed, and many who are horrified at the primal forces he seems to be unleashing in the hearts and, um, other parts of America.

I don’t know Austin Butler from anything else. I don’t even think he looks that much like Elvis at any stage of his life. I’m not sure it even matters. Elvis has been an icon for over half a century, and I haven’t forgotten what the original looks like, so I don’t need too many reminders.

But he is beautiful, just like young Elvis was beautiful; there are some incredible shots of him, as Elvis, looking incredibly beautiful. It reminds me of a quote from Madonna (allegedly, though I am pretty sure it was drummed up by a harried, underpaid publicist) many years ago that goes like this: “Elvis is alive, and she is beautiful”, but it was in reference to legendary Canadian singer k.d. lang. I like to think that it’s a compliment both to her incredible voice and her youthful beauty way back then.

In other words, Austin Butler looks like a very young and beautiful k.d. lang / Elvis. He embodies…something powerful on stage, for brief moments. They feel like, or I was tricked into feeling an incredible swell of emotion with of these many moments.

He does okay in the mundane conversational moments, but I felt like the director didn’t trust him enough with those scenes, impatient as he is for the next over-edited set piece.

I’m sorry that Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge) didn’t make much of an impression on me, though we do see a sweet baby standing / lying in for poor Lisa Marie, who died only recently. They also don’t point out that Elvis was, um, doing to Priscilla what he was doing to America when she was well under age, well before they were married (as if that changes anything). It feels a bit pointless having to say this, but clearly I think that was bad. Bad Elvis.

If you’re the strange kind of person who cares about costuming, well, this film has a lot of costumes. I thought almost every single thing Elvis wears looks amazing in this, at almost every stage, almost to the point where some of those outfits upstage the dialogue. The outfits look amazing, even and especially the Vegas ones towards the end, in which he karate kicks and pounces about like the panther that he is.

The lead up to what’s come to be called the ’68 Comeback Special works really well in terms of showing just how much Elvis wanted to reconnect with his music and do something different to touch contemporary audiences, and how it was the absolute opposite of what the doddering Colonel wanted at every stage. Their conflicts grow and grow, and though we already hate the Colonel for being so awful (and also, perversely, for how completely uninterested he is in actual music) and because of Hanks’s awful, strange performance, we only get more reasons to loathe him the closer Elvis gets to his last days.

And of course, this being the film that it is, Elvis still looks beautiful even when he’s tending towards his latter stage Vegas days, for which he is most derided to this day, as if the rest of us are immune from the effects of steady diet of fried food and pethidine, like we’re so much better than he was.

Against my will, I say that this ending somehow really works, and makes us feel, however untrue that it is, that he died because he gave too much to us, gave too much of himself, that it shouldn’t have gone this way if he’d just beaten the Colonel to death with a guitar back when he had the chance back in the 50s. That the parasitic Colonel drained everything from the greatest performer the world had ever seen, and we are eternally the poorer for it.

That’s an amazing trick, pulling that off, since we have to know how untrue that is. But that’s what people who voluntarily watch Baz Luhrmann films are hoping for: to be tricked into thinking they’re watching something magical, even if they know it is a trick.

I would love if there was somehow an edit of this flick in which every single moment of voiceover, of that terrible Dutch accented Hanks narration could be completely deleted. It would improve the film immeasurably. For ages I thought he was doing a German accent from Sergeant Schulz in Hogan’s Heroes. I kept waiting for him to bellow “I know nuthink!!!” Ugh.

Elvis is definitely no masterpiece, it’s not even a good film. But it reaches for something, and a-a-a-a-a-a-almost gets there, and you have to appreciate that.

Well, you don’t have to, but I tried to explain why.

7 times and Elvis is still dead out of 10

--
““The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin’ now, man, for more years than I know. They played it like that in their shanties and in their juke joints and nobody paid it no mind ‘til I goosed it up. I got it from them. Down in Tupelo, Mississippi, I used to hear old Arthur Crudup bang his box the way I do now and I said if I ever got to a place I could feel all old Arthur felt, I’d be a music man like nobody ever saw.” – Elvis Aron Presley.