Elvis (2022 | USA/Australia | 159 minutes | Baz Luhrmann)
With Moulin Rouge, Baz Luhrmann is responsible for one of the best and memorable movie musicals in recent memory but it was lyrics from another modern musical that ran through my mind while watching Luhrmann’s newest, a biopic about Elvis Presley. In the song “Razzle Dazzle” from Chicago, Billy Flynn (played by Richard Gere in the movie and Jerry Orbach on Broadway) sings, “Back since the days of old Methuselah, everyone loves a big bamboozler; Give ‘em the old three-ring-circus, stun and stagger ‘em, when you’re in trouble, go into your dance…” There is a lot of razzle dazzle in Elvis and it honestly made me not care about some of the movie’s very large flaws. I had a great time watching this movie even though most of the criticisms I and others have are valid.
The story of Elvis Presley cannot be told without the story of his crooked but charismatic manager Col. Tom Parker, an enigmatic figure whose life’s details are not easy to access. Elvis is narrated by the Parker character, played by Tom Hanks who is as unrecognizable as Tom Hanks can be. Luhrmann’s film often notes the mysteriousness of Parker, who was not actually a colonel in the military, wasn’t born in the US, and seems to have an aversion to leaving its borders. But there’s a lot to Parker’s mystique that isn’t touched on. It appears that he was actually born in the Netherlands in 1909 as Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk. He was reportedly discharged from the US Army because of a psychotic break and subsequently gorged his way into obesity to avoid the draft for WWII. He might also have come to the US to flee murder accusations.
When Parker saw Elvis Presley perform for the first time, he got dollar signs in his eyes and saw the future of both rock and roll and Tom Parker. Luhrmann portrays the early Elvis shows as orgasmic for his largely female fans in the crowd. The live music scenes, I think, are the best parts of the movie. Elvis’s early concerts, him watching Little Richard perform “Tutti Frutti” in a small club, and the “‘68 Comeback Special” are all great fun to watch. When Elvis and B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) watched Little Richard play, Elvis told King that he would like to record “Tutti Frutti” and that gave me some fleeting hope we could’ve avoided Pat Boone altogether. Even in what Elvis considered his most embarrassing moment, performing “Hound Dog” on the “Steve Allen Show” in loose clothing to avoid televising his hip gyrations, he sounds great and performs in front of an adorable basset hound. Purely as someone who dated into a family of basset lovers, it was one of my favorite scenes.
Austin Butler is quite good in his first starring role as Presley. He seemed like a good fit for one to play one of the most uniquely charismatic people to ever live.
Among the things I didn’t like were that this movie is basically hagiography. There’s no complexity to his character even though there are so many opportunities to explore someone so unique. Any negative aspects seem to come from Elvis being a victim of his manager’s controlling every aspect of his life. There’s even less with Priscilla. Olivia DeJong is serviceable as the King’s dutiful and long-suffering wife but she’s not different from every other dutiful and long-suffering wife of a famous person in movies.
When it comes to the Col. Tom Parker portrayal by Tom Hanks, even buried under fat suits, prosthetics, and makeup, he’s still Tom Hanks. He brings so much-needed star power to this movie, but evoking any real malevolence is something I’ve never really found him do convincingly.
But whenever I got annoyed with the inconsistencies of Hanks’s’ accent or frustrated with the lack of dimension from its heroes, or that any mention of my favorite episode in Elvis’s life goes ignored, or any of the film’s other flaws, Baz Luhrmann gives us an expertly filmed musical scene and all is forgotten and forgiven.
It could be bamboozlement or it could just be showbiz. I’m going to go with the latter.
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Elvis is playing in theaters now.