Elvis (2022)
dir. Baz Luhrmann
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2022 Warner Bros. Pictures
The key moment in Baz Luhrmann’s latest cinematic maximalist bacchanal – about the one and only King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley – comes within the picture’s first five or ten minutes. The internet meme culture overlords got it immediately. It’s the scene, which became a viral sensation, of Tom Hanks’s Colonel Tom Parker being informed that the voice he’s hearing on the radio, Elvis singing That’s All Right, belongs to a white man. “He’s white…,” Hanks’s Parker says as if in a trance; it’s half-question, half-stunned-declarative-statement.
Col. Tom – who represented Presley from 1956 until the singer’s tragic death in 1977 and helped himself to over half of everything Elvis earned – is our (not so) humble narrator. He acknowledges that some will consider him “the villain of this here story.” Luhrmann let’s Col. Tom have his say, but he also uses his strong directorial hand to make sure we see the one-time carnie’s legacy of selfish and cruel behavior and the role it played in Elvis’s descent into addiction, despair, and, ultimately, death.
For those paying attention, Luhrmann gets the last laugh on Col. Tom. For all his bluster, all his dreams of reaching for eternity (by riding the coattails of real talent), attentive viewers realize that Col. Tom’s entire contribution to the idea of Elvis is in that early opening scene. The only real original idea the huckster ever had was to realize that a white man who could sound like a Black man, and was therefore “safe” for the white establishment, would make him rich beyond his wildest dreams.
The frustrating thing about Elvis is that, almost on a scene-by-scene basis, the movie is confused about its own understanding and recognition of the centrality of Elvis’s race in his culture-upending legacy. On the one hand, Elvis acknowledges that Presley’s entire career was built on the fact that he could find success appropriating the sound and culture of a marginalized community. It’s a community whose members have been denied that same success for no other reason than the color of their skin.
On the other, the movie eulogizes the man, who has been dead now for more years than he was alive, as someone who is still influencing culture and music to this day, without also acknowledging those he took from, who were systemically barred from attaining the same influence and success.
The sequence that perfectly illustrates this uneasy tension – the one that wants to eat its cake and have it, too – shows us a wide-eyed, adolescent Elvis growing up in a poor Black neighborhood in segregated Mississippi. The Presleys had fallen on even harder economic times after Elvis’s father, Vernon, was sentenced to jail for stealing to provide for his family.
In this sequence, we see Elvis being shocked and titillated by Black bodies dancing suggestively at a social hangout – the movie Dirty Dancing came instantly to my mind during the scene – to what white society at the time denigrated as “race music.” Within Luhrmann’s signature freewheeling and chaotic aesthetic, Elvis makes his way directly from that ecstatic experience to another, as he watches a Black church congregation give praise to the lord through gospel music.
It's an extended sequence that seems to grasp Elvis’s seminal musical and cultural influences even as it fetishizes that culture and the Black bodies it’s ostensibly praising. The movie reduces this community by simultaneously sexualizing them and extolling their spiritual practices.
There are also what I have to imagine are highly fictionalized conversations between Elvis and Black luminaries in the jazz and blues world of the time, like B.B. King. As represented in Elvis, these Black performers are never so much as the least bit salty that this white boy is repackaging their music to great fame and success. King is simply happy to talk to a fellow artist and he appreciates that Elvis has a gift and is talented enough to achieve great things. He acknowledges that his friend’s whiteness is the key to unlock the cultural revolution, but, as handled by the movie, King sees this more as a pragmatic assessment rather than as cause for frustration.
So, the last line of text in the movie, of the variety we’ve become accustomed to seeing at the end of biopics, extolls the cultural impact of Elvis’s legacy as if he invented it himself from whole cloth. I can offer one, and only one, defense of this obtuse boiling down of Presley’s legacy, and it dovetails into what Elvis and Luhrmann do so well when documenting their subject’s life story.
By the time Elvis Presley became The King of Rock and Roll, and then, simply, The King, he had created a wholly unique persona. (I grew up in Texas and am of a certain age so that I can distinctly remember the way older Southern mega-fans of Elvis would pronounce The King as “Tha Kang.” Sometimes, if they felt particularly close to their hero, they would refer to him as just “Kang” (“You see that velvet painting I got of Kang hangin’ in the living room?”))
I’m talking about the comeback-TV-special Elvis when I mention this wholly unique persona. It’s Vegas Elvis. It’s increasingly garish and flamboyant rhinestone-encrusted jumpsuit Elvis, with the sunglasses to match. The Charlie-bring-me-my-water-and-my-towel-to-wipe-the-sweat-away Elvis. The Elvis-has-left-the-building Elvis.
By this point, basically the whole of his career by the 1970s, Kang had mutated and transformed into a wholly new creature. He was on a planet of his own as a sui generis rock god; no one else looked, acted, or sounded anything like him. He had become an entity unto himself, and everyone else in the world was on a tier below him. In this way, yes, Elvis absolutely molded the culture in his own image.
It’s this human drama – the charting of how Elvis went from a simple Mississippi boy who loved his momma more than anything to the faded Vegas icon – that Luhrmann captures so well. Elvis makes the case, in no uncertain terms, that it was Col. Tom, who set a standard of Elvis being the trough at which everyone the singer personally knew could feed from indefinitely, who is to blame for Presley’s tragic final years.
As well as Luhrmann’s film represents this hellish psychological reality, it never fully captures what it must have been like for the man to realize that every single person in his life was more concerned about getting him on that stage in Vegas than anything else, including his own wellbeing. The film comes closest in the moment when Elvis collapses before one of his nightly Vegas-residency shows.
His own father – who watched his wife succumb to her struggle with alcohol while worrying about Elvis during his highly-publicized stint in the US military – shows what matters to him most. He asks Elvis’s personal Doctor Feelgood, Dr. Nick, if there is anything that will get his son back up and ready for the performance, instead of insisting he be taken to a hospital.
This knowledge, whether conscious or unconscious, makes the booze-and-pills spiral tragically understandable and lamentable.
Austin Butler’s extraordinary performance as Elvis is mostly responsible for how close the film gets to capturing the cultural icon’s crushing reality. Butler is channeling Elvis here, and it’s not simple mimicry or impression. In collaboration with his director, Butler bottles some of the heat that audiences must have felt when the Mississippi crooner started wiggling those hips. (There’s a great moment when Presley is frustrated that his upcoming appearance on The Steve Allen Show might evaporate if he doesn’t agree to stand still during his performance. Elvis says he doesn’t want the appearance “cancelled,” in a dig at our current national freakout over “cancel culture.”)
Butler provided the vocals for the early performances in Presley’s career, and for the later years, Luhrmann blended Butler’s voice with the real thing. The actor has a voice as sweet and melodious as the man he’s portraying.
Tom Hanks is miscast as Col. Tom Parker. I understand that the real Parker – born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk in the Netherlands, before illegally immigrating to the US and pretending to be from West Virginia – must have had a slippery accent. There is another layer of discomfort added in hearing that squirrely drawl, sometimes Dutch, sometimes German, sometimes southern, come out of Tom Hanks’s mouth. As America’s Dad™, Hanks confounds me whenever he steps into the role of a villain, and his fat-suit getup is so unsettling that I could think of little else whenever the actor appeared on the screen.
Baz Luhrmann hasn’t lost a step in his signature maximum-muchness style. If you found yourself swept up in Moulin Rouge! or The Great Gatsby, like I did, you won’t be disappointed in the Aussie director’s breakneck pace and gleefully campy aesthetic for Elvis. He paints a portrait of a troubled, complicated figure with compassion and empathy. Questions about the provenance of Elvis’s style and sound aside, it’s undeniable that the man had an incalculable impact on world culture, and Luhrmann’s tribute to him is a fitting, if imperfect, tribute to a legend.
Why it got 3.5 stars:
Aside from some of the disappointing race issues present in this telling of Elvis’s life, Baz Luhrmann’s film is pure Luhrmann, which helps to rein in some of the biggest pitfalls of biopics. We never see, for instance, Elvis plunking away on a piano, hitting on his most successful melody, then sayings something like, “Yeah, I think that might be pretty good,” as we got in the mostly dreadful Bohemian Rhapsody. Luhrmann was too worried with squeezing that 60th edit into a 60-second sequence. From that perspective, Luhrmann remains The King of Cinematic Muchness.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- The scene where Col. Tom spots his prey for the first time is deliciously over-the-top camp. Hanks’s Parker looks at Elvis’s shadowed face or back — the film is wonderfully cagey on giving us our first full glimpse of E as a performer — like Elvis is a woman whom Parker wants to fuck. Parker looks at Elvis like Uther Pendragon looked at Ygraine, and it’s splendidly campy.
- Speaking of sex, say what you will about Elvis’s whiteness being the direct cause of his success, he also, because of his whiteness, made it possible (if not exactly acceptable), for the first time in history, for young white women to display desire — you can almost here in the teen-girls' screams, “I want to fuck him!” — which was a cultural shift almost impossible to overstate. Luhrmann also incorporates, sooooo subtly, that women weren’t the only ones ogling Elvis’s pelvis. In one moment, Elvis is on TV, and a group of young people are watching at home. In the background is a conservative politician, railing on the phone against the immorality of the culture. His teenage son is one of the kids watching Elvis, and, although Luhrmann never emphasizes it, the look on that kid’s face is pure ecstasy.
- I loved the short sequence which gives us Elvis’s backstory by way of comic strip animation, of which, we find out, Elvis was a big fan, especially Captain Marvel Jr.
- There are two fairly egregious on-the-nose moments that initiated an eye-roll from me. The first is a line of dialog about how Elvis’s adoring teen-girl fans “could have eaten him alive,” while we watch said fans attempt to rip the singer’s clothes off. The second is in the later stage of the story, when Col. Tom has trapped his golden goose in a Vegas residency in order to secure his own endless line of credit at the casino. As Parker is making the duplicitous deal, Elvis is on stage, singing the words, “…I’m caught in a trap…I can’t walk out…”
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Elvis is currently available to stream with an HBO Max subscription, which is how I saw it. This is my first in a series of five that will allow me to write about all the 2023 Oscar Best Picture nominees.