"Elvis": review

Director Baz Luhrmann strikes again with his 2022 musical biopic "Elvis" which, alas, makes no mention of Elvis's love for peanut butter and 'nanner sandwiches. The movie stars Austin Butler as Elvis, with Tom Hanks as Elvis's manager/promoter, Colonel Tom Parker.

The story of Elvis is told from the perspective of Colonel Parker, an illegal alien and shyster who, as it turned out, worked Elvis to death, took half of Elvis's money, and did it all while positioning himself as Elvis's friend and even father figure (despite the fact that Elvis's dad outlived his son). The Tom Parker we're given speaks in a vaguely Dutch accent, and in view of his reputation, he is, even as he narrates Elvis's life, understandably defensive about his own role in that life. As the biopic unfurls, we come to understand that Tom Parker is an exploiter and a parasite who latched onto Elvis and sucked him dry, but in what can only be described as karmic justice, Parker loses millions to his own gambling addiction and ends up in a hospital after a stroke. (Elvis died in 1977; Parker died 20 years later in 1997.)

We see Elvis growing up poor in Mississippi, then moving to Memphis, Tennessee. As a kid, Elvis was fascinated with and influenced by gospel and the blues—the music of the local black folks. There are scenes of the young Elvis (Chaydon Jay) peeking into a gospel church service with a charismatic-Christian denomination, then entering the service and becoming filled with the Holy Spirit, dancing ecstatically and eventually falling limp, being caught up by church members before he can hit the ground. Some of these scenes are intercut with images of young Elvis peeking into passionate, sensual performances of the blues, giving us a feeling that, in Elvis's young mind, the ecstatic transports of church music and the pulsing, grinding sexuality of the more secular music were of a piece, both representing a form of joy that was, at the time, not very well known to the larger white community.

Flash forward to Elvis as a very young man. Colonel Tom Parker, a carnival "snowman" at the time (i.e., a grifter who excels at the "snow job"—as he tells Elvis, "All showmen are snowmen"), hears of Elvis and watches him perform. He insinuates himself into Elvis's life, altering the trajectory of both men forever. Parker helps make Elvis famous while feeding off Elvis's fame. Elvis's unbridled sexuality while onstage (the movie covers the whole "Elvis the Pelvis" thing) makes him the darling of young women everywhere while incurring the wrath of more sexually conservative elements in American society at the time (ironically, these were mostly Democrats). Elvis's fame increases exponentially for a while; he and his family are lifted out of poverty and end up at the famous Graceland, but it becomes obvious that Parker is doing what he can to control both Elvis's public image and where Elvis can perform. Eventually, our protagonist succumbs to the temptations of life on the road—the adoring girls, the drugs, and the intoxicating ego-rush of fame. 

Elvis's beloved mother died in the late 1950s, and his father died two years after Elvis did, in 1979. Elvis himself died of a probable heart attack, possibly brought on by straining against constipation that impacted his aorta; the movie doesn't deal with the disgusting details of his death, such as that he had died on the toilet (and fallen forward onto the floor) with a "clay-like" substance in his colon (called by experts, heedless of the humor, a "megacolon" given the volume of material it contained), likely a result of the cocktail of drugs he'd been taking.

Politically speaking, the film tilts both leftward and rightward (by today's weird standards) in certain ways. On the leftward side, the film deals frankly with the black influence on Elvis's music, with Elvis himself even uttering a line, at one point, in which he rejects the label of "King of Rock and Roll" while saying that black artists like BB King ought to have such a title. The film also deals head-on with the racism of the segregationist era. Elvis's unabashed sensuality can also be seen as vintage-left, but here, we stray into rightie territory: Elvis's attempts at free expression are shown to lead to moves by elements in the government and society to shut Elvis down. The verb "cancel" is even used at one point in the same sense in which it's used these days. In one performance, Elvis ignores Parker's advice to behave himself and gives the type of performance he wants to give, with all the attendant hip thrusts and gyrations. The fans go nuts, but the police swarm in and Elvis is taken away—not because he was in danger, but because of the way he was performing.

And I haven't seen any other critics mention this, but I think the movie traffics, at least a little, in its own racism: the stereotype that black folks possess some kind of sex magic, and that Elvis became the white conduit for that magic, bringing white women to transports of near-religious ecstasy. Maybe there's some historical truth to this: some musical historians do see Elvis as a sort of gateway or portal that allowed black music to find an audience among the white people of the time. But, historically true or not, it felt to me as if the film were simply going along with a particular racial stereotype.

I also found some of the directorial and editorial choices to be somewhat on the nose. When Elvis sings about feeling trapped ("Suspicious Minds"), this is an obvious reference—at least in the film—to how he feels about his relationship with Tom Parker during his later years... and then the movie has Elvis actually rant about how trapped he feels, thus driving home the metaphor in a way that utterly violates the sacred cinematic law of "show, don't tell."

Musically, well, this is a Baz Luhrmann film, so you can expect Luhrmann to integrate music smoothly into the story. This isn't a musical, though; unlike a Luhrmann film like "Moulin Rouge," it's not every single character who gets a moment to sing. This is a typically mythologized biopic, but one in which only the true singers sing. So we hear Elvis, BB King (Kelvin Harrison), Little Richard (Alton Mason, impressive), and Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh), among others.

In terms of acting, the cast around the principals does a fine job. We don't see much of Little Richard, but Alton Mason (as Richard) nevertheless makes a huge impression; I look forward to seeing him in other work. The actor who plays country singer Hank Snow (David Wenham, better known as Faramir in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy) doesn't get much screen time, but he's hilarious as a God-fearin' good ol' boy who's scandalized when he watches Elvis perform. Helen Thomson, as Elvis's eternally stressed mother Gladys, does a fine job (this includes some weirdly creepy, quasi-incestuous scenes with Elvis). Richard Roxburgh (also in "Moulin Rouge" as the Duke), gives a good performance as Elvis's squirrely, weak-chinned dad Vernon. Olivia DeJonge is a trouper as Elvis's wife Priscilla, although she was a bit too old to play Priscilla in her teenaged years.

And we have to talk about the two elephants in the room: Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker, and Austin Butler as The Man Himself. Hanks is dressed up in a fat suit and hidden under a lot of latex, and I had to wonder why Luhrmann didn't just cast someone who naturally resembled Parker. Hanks normally plays good-guy roles, so it was a bit strange to see him here, playing against type, as our villain-narrator. With Hanks looking so unrealistic, I sometimes found it hard to suspend disbelief. I've also heard other critics note that the real Colonel Parker didn't sound anything like the way Hanks made him sound (I found an interview with Ted Koppel in which Parker sounds completely American; while I'm at it, here's a video contending that the biopic got everything wrong about Elvis). Why Hanks affected the weird Dutch accent is beyond me. Austin Butler, in the meantime, gave an outstanding performance as Elvis. He's right up there with Taron Egerton as Elton John and Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury. Butler is expressive and impassioned; he nails many of Elvis's signal mannerisms without drifting into parody. Alas, we don't get to see Fat Elvis until the very, very end of the film, but when we do, there's a subtle switch during that scene in which we're suddenly watching the real Elvis—in his Fat Elvis phase—perform "Unchained Melody" onstage. It may sound morbid, but Butler inhabited Elvis like a sweaty skin suit, although there where times when his sensual, hollow-cheeked performance reminded me of Val Kilmer's Elvis parody from "Top Secret." Apparently, Butler sang all the songs we hear in the film, with his voice being used for young Elvis, while his voice was electronically blended with that of the real Elvis for later songs sung when Elvis was older.

All in all, though, I'm not sure how much I liked this biopic, especially compared to biopics like "Rocketman" and "Bohemian Rhapsody," both of which played fast and loose with facts but gave the audience a propulsive, energetic narrative. Part of the problem was the weird way in which "Elvis" was paced. While I've enjoyed Luhrmann's editing in the past, especially with the gonzo "Moulin Rouge," "Elvis" often felt uncomfortably surreal, moving the story forward via a series of scenes that seemed to bleed rapidly from one into another, tumbling heedlessly forward. By the time I was an hour into the film, I felt as if the movie needed to end—that we had seen most of the signal events in Elvis's life, and it was time to wrap things up. But the movie proved to be 159 minutes long, so after that exhausting first hour, there was a lot more story left. Honestly, the film could have trimmed half of its run time away, and it would have benefitted from tighter pacing. Then again, even though the film was a biopic, it was also a chance to take a tour through a crucial couple of decades of American history, giving us the deaths of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, which may explain the story's ambitious length. The movie also isn't subtle about who should be viewed as a hero and who should be viewed as the villain. Tom Parker comes off as practically satanic in the way he latches onto Elvis and bleeds him. Elvis is portrayed as hard-working, overly dedicated to his fans, misunderstood by social conservatives, and a victim of his own stardom. Another problem is that the movie never mentions the fact that Elvis wrote none of the lyrics for his songs: through the years, several lyricists provided the words that Elvis sang, including people like Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber. In the movie, no lyricists are mentioned at all. Also unmentioned is that Elvis could neither read nor write music—everything was played by ear. Through title cards at the end, the movie drives home the point that Elvis influenced American culture, and that he was and remains the best-selling solo musical act in history. This felt like another violation of "show, don't tell," and I had the sense that I was being preached to.

If you're a lover of Luhrmann's work, I think there's a lot that you'll love about "Elvis." If you're more of a critical skeptic, you might not love the movie quite as much. I suspect that a lot of people were as turned off by Tom Hanks's distracting costume design as I was, but at the same time, I can see audiences being drawn to Austin Butler's magnetic performance. Butler really is the standout here, and he almost makes the movie for me. Almost.