Review: "Elvis"

Baz Luhrmann's music biopic flip-flops between incendiary musicality and interminability.

Elvis (Dir. Baz Luhrmann)

How long are we going to stay happy with the music biopic formula? From Walk the Line to Straight Outta Compton to Bohemian Rhapsody, the story stays the same: cradle-to-grave tales of real-world rockstars gloriously rising to the top, crashing to the bottom, and then finally finding third-act musical redemption. The rockstar will meet the nice-seeming manager who ends up taking half the money; he finds love and marriage; he discovers a world of addiction and alcoholism that brings it all to a halt. Be sure to show that rockstar in all their shimmering glory by the film’s end—we can’t forget that these are godlike figures, whatever their debauched lifestyle.

Baz Luhrmann, the madcap maximalist behind Moulin Rouge! (2001) and The Great Gatsby (2013), continues these overused biopic traditions with Elvis while turning the energy up to a sugar-rushed eleven. This turbocharged, neon-soaked vision of the King of Rock and Roll starts off invigorating—Austin Butler, who plays Presley, delivers a magnificent impersonation—yet it quickly ends up an exhausting experience. Once Luhrmann’s tendencies for deification settle in, Elvis becomes a two-hour-and-forty-minute music video, one that is less interested in investigating Presley’s cultural intricacies than in painting him as the White Savior that never was. The story is told through the narration of evil émigré Colonel Tom Parker, (played by an inscrutable Dutch accent and fat suit inside a Tom Hanks costume), the carny-turned-music manager who scoops up Elvis at a young age. This is the movie’s essential trick: the Colonel’s third-person narration renders Elvis less a human being with faults and desires than an unimpeachable liberator, a passive current of musical electricity who bridges racial divides and brings women to orgasm. It’s a ridiculously—and sometimes shamefully—reductive notion, one that overstays its welcome far too early into the film. But then again, a crazed extravaganza like this one is still enjoyable in its own caffeine-addled way. Just know that the caffeine doesn’t let up for the better part of three hours.

The film shines in its first act, capturing the essence of Presley’s incendiary stage presence. In a perfect symbiosis of Luhrmann’s kinetic direction and Butler’s explosive energy, the opening scenes alternate between Elvis’ childhood in Tupelo, Mississippi—where he finds himself “taken by the spirit” of Black gospel choirs—and an early 1955 performance at the “Louisiana Hayride” radio show, which brings the ecstatic pink-suited dance moves that defined Presley’s early career. These moments jump with giddy excitement, capturing a stage energy usually seen only in concert documentaries. As Elvis lights up the stage, Colonel Parker lurks in the background, crooning ominously about the audience’s reactions. One girl, he notices, responds to Elvis’ gyrations with “feelings she wasn’t sure she should enjoy”—something of which the Colonel is quick to advantage. The film is at its absolute best in moments like these, as Butler’s dynamite live performance fluidly intermingles with the Colonel’s sinister ambitions.

There are other moments like this—Elvis’ 1968 television “comeback” special is a particular highlight—but a by-the-numbers biopic plotline keeps these moments from flourishing. The broken music biopic formula is in full swing here: The Colonel begins reeling in Elvis with promises of fame and fortune; Elvis soon finds riotous television success before being shipped off to Germany for his two years in the army; Elvis returns to brief Hollywood fame before astonishing with his television special; Elvis succeeds in his end-of-career Las Vegas period while the Colonel delivers his worst exploitation of The King at the end of his rope. Luhrmann recounts this four-decade story through eye-grabbing montage sequences that, in all their hopped-up excitement, forget to note any of the questionable or unappealing aspects of Presley’s career. What were his stagnant acting years like? How did the Black community feel about his appropriation of their musical styles? The answer the film offers ends up a resounding “Don’t worry about it,” preferring to ignore difficult questions.

Not that Luhrmann could offer up any other answer. His need to cast Presley in immaculate form chafes against necessary debates about his cultural legacy. The film does well to show the influence that African-American gospel and R&B had on Presley’s style, yet it continually insists that these appropriations were universally approved rather than hotly debated (such that has been discussed elsewhere). Elvis’s only Black character containing any substantive characterization is its version of B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), who serves solely to provide narrative support for the Elvis fan club. Other Black characters, like the odd cameo performance by Little Richard (Alton Mason) or Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola), are empty vessels rather than fleshed-out characters, husks that reify Elvis’ sanctified genius. Such is the result of Luhrmann’s Christ-like vision of The King: rather than take the time to unpack Presley’s complex impact on American culture, Elvis portrays its superstar as the One Good White Man, a passive being upon whom actions and ideas are thrust rather than committing actions unto the world. It’s not just that this forces the film to have a regressive portrayal of Black characters—which it most certainly does—it also makes the film far less interesting than it should be. When your protagonist is impenetrable, when he doesn’t have any flaws—what is there to even grasp onto?

By the time that Elvis is making his Vegas comeback two hours into its runtime, the realization dawns that there are still thirty-plus minutes left in the runtime and the ennui settles in. By now Elvis has married Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge), become a rampant pill-popper, and is in the worst throes of the Colonel’s abuse. All these beats feel uninspired when you’ve already seen them in Rocketman, or Ray, or any other music biopic of recent years. A script by Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, and Craig Pearce replicates the same tired tropes, ending up with the same overextended failure to capture the intricacies of a life and career. There are glimmers of enjoyment, as with the grandstanding musical performances that take place at the International Hotel, the Vegas stage that hosted the performances of Presley’s later years. One spectacular rendition of “That’s All Right Mama” is split-screened with other performances of the same song from earlier in the film: one from Elvis’ first four-piece recording session in 1954, the other from a singular African American guitar player from Tupelo. Framing them in the same shot, we witness the decades-long popularization of rockabilly and blues in a single image. It’s a wonderful moment, one nevertheless tainted with the knowledge that the film would rather give more credit to Elvis than his musical originators.

At the end of Elvis, when our titular rockstar dies sadly at the age of 42, I couldn’t help but think that two hours and forty minutes hardly scratched anything beneath the surface of Presley’s life story. I also couldn’t help but be relieved to exit the movie theater, my eyes having been seared by nonstop musical chaos. Would it not have been better to focus in on a more specific period of Presley’s career? Luhrmann’s most interesting section of the film is his Vegas comeback; perhaps a shorter film about that 9-year stretch might have been more effective. The problem here is not just beholden to Elvis—it is rather endemic to the wider biopic genre. No rockstar biopic I’ve seen has successfully grappled with a superstar’s cultural impact while also recounting the totality of their existence. If, as per Alfred Hitchcock, movies are little more than life with all the boring bits cut out, then rockstar movies reveal this lesson taken to excess: an entire life cannot fit into the minimized frame of a feature film.

“70 years in a man’s life—that’s a lot to try to get into a newsreel,” say the journalists of Citizen Kane trying to tell the story of that film’s own rockstar, Charles Foster Kane. If Elvis is anything to go by, so is 40. —James Fahey