Elvis

I attended an advanced screening of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis in the summer of 2022. This was in a small college town in Eastern Washington, and the showing was sparsely populated. I noted, as a handful of people made it into the theater, that, in my late 40s, I was easily the youngest person there. There were no young couples and no one else in my age bracket, let alone younger. I grew up listening to Elvis Presley because my parents listened to him when I was a child. Mostly, that has passed us by, and our current generation doesn’t look back at where the influences are anymore. 

What struck me even more than this, though, was after the movie ended and the credits were rolling, these elderly patrons weren’t getting up to leave right away the way most audiences do anymore. Instead, they were talking, loudly enough that I could hear them over the music, about how they had all seen Elvis on stage back in the day. Apparently, he had toured in the area at one point because the conversation included regional areas he had performed in. As I reflected on this, and the nearly mind-numbing amounts of concert footage recreated and the screaming fans cheering for The King, I tried to picture these people being there, young and full of youthful vigor and adolescent hormones, screaming in excitement as Elvis in his prime took the stage.

I was reminded of a woman I once worked with who was approaching retirement, telling me once that she had watched The Beatles live on the Ed Sullivan Show, screaming herself hoarse alongside her girlfriends. These clips we have watched on TV, YouTube, or in documentaries were defining moments in the youth of the era, and there are still people out there who experienced these things firsthand and reminisce about this bygone era in music history. 

I was born far too late to have seen Elvis live on stage; I would have been about one year old when he died. The closest I will ever get to experiencing that kind of energy was seeing Paul McCartney of The Beatles live, performing before an audience so diverse it was incredible to behold. This is what Elvis would have ended up like had he lived into his 80s the way Paul has. The music was great, the energy was palpable, and for three solid hours the old and the young were enchanted by the music. It mattered not that much of what was sung that night was music that was old before many of these people were born. Great music lives on and is never really forgotten, especially when families share it with their children, keeping it alive.

So when I think back to that viewing experience in the summer of 2022, more than the story, more than the sometimes garish camera work, frenetic editing, and Baz Luhrmann’s penchant for overindulgence, I remember the songs and how they made that relatively small audience and myself feel in the moment. Those people were there to relive the feeling of seeing Elvis Presley in his heyday, seeing the young heartthrob who thrust his pelvis towards an audience of screaming young girls and changed the world forever. There may not have been a lot of us in the theater audience that day, but you could feel that we were all hypnotized by that experience and, for a short while at least, those people were transported back to their youth and what it was like to be mesmerized by The King of Rock ‘N’ Roll.

It’s been four years since that experience. Until this morning, I had not revisited this film; I generally have little time to do that with any film anymore. What I wondered was whether it would hold up to scrutiny when watched at home without those people around me. After all, truly great films can stand up on their own. I can watch Casablanca with an excited audience in a big theater or on my iPad at home and will always be drawn in to that beautiful drama. Would Elvis stand up to the same test? The answer is not as straight-forward as I expected. 

Baz Luhrmann is not a man who makes subtle films. His Moulin Rouge! is gaudy and vulgar, flashy almost to a fault. But it works for that film because it is about a gaudy and vulgar corner of French entertainment. This style of filmmaking didn’t work as well with his adaptation of The Great Gatsby, a film that seems desperate to breathe excitement into an otherwise straightforward love story. While that film is not awful, it feels too off-balance between style and substance. But a biopic about Elvis Presley feels like it could right that ship because there is so much of both in the life of Elvis Presley. Baz can bring the man out on stage in the most over-the-top flamboyant outfits and have him thrust that pelvis so hard you’d think he’d rupture something, and it will come across as authentic because that is what Elvis was like. This combination of the real Presley and Baz Luhrmann’s penchant for over-the-top theatrics should be a match-made-in-heaven. 

There is one problem, though. And, until I saw that first trailer for the film, I would have never thought it was possible. That problem is Tom Hanks. I wasn’t the only one watching that trailer with raised eyebrows, wondering what in the world he was doing in this. Tom Hanks is in full prosthetics and a fat suit, speaking in a heavily exaggerated accent like he was making a film with Adam Sandler and the gang. After seeing that trailer, I looked up footage of the character he was playing, Colonel Tom Parker, and was even more confused because this was not how the real man sounded. It was a weird choice to pick Tom Hanks to play this somewhat villainous role and then have him play it like this. It doesn’t ruin the film, and you eventually get used to it, but it is off-putting in all the wrong ways. It feels like a caricature dropped in the middle of an otherwise serious biopic.

Austin Butler, on the other hand, was an ingenious choice to play Elvis. He had been around before, though nothing I had seen prior to this had made much of an impression on me. He simply embodies Elvis Presley in all of his stages from youthful exuberance to burned out and overweight, pill-chugging Elvis. This was an opportunity of a lifetime, and he made the most of it. It made him a star to stand up and notice, a name to get excited about when attached to new projects. 

Baz Luhrmann was looking to explore the entirety of the relationship between Elvis and the Colonel, starting the film with their introduction to each other and following it all the way until Elvis’s death. We get a few short flashbacks to even earlier than that, but mostly we stay focused on this relationship and how the Colonel latched onto Elvis like a leech and kept him on a tight leash. This is such a long period of time that it makes the film feel overstuffed, trying to cram in too much information into a single picture. It is no surprise, then, to find out that this project was initially envisioned as a miniseries instead. That format would have allowed this material to breathe a little better rather than rushing through the details. Baz has spoken up about this and mentioned that he has more than an hour of cut material he wants to reinsert back into the film, bringing the running time to over four hours. As of this writing, no such extended cut has been released.

The family of Elvis Presley, especially his ex-wife Priscilla and her children with him, have been outspoken with their admiration for this film and how it nailed the feel of the late rocker. However, others have pointed out that, while it gives service to his musical inspirations in blues and soul music, it neglects his gospel, country, and crooner inspirations. This film focuses heavily on how he was inspired by the black music of the time, including BB King and Little Richard, even showcasing some of their showmanship becoming a part of his stage persona. Perhaps in that longer cut, more time is dedicated to other styles that formed what we would know as ELVIS.

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is loud and gaudy, but then so was Elvis himself. These two mesh well together and give you a real feeling for what it was like seeing Elvis in his heyday and beyond. But the film tackles too much, leaving very little time to relish in any one thing. Before too long, Elvis is having a slump in his career, and we’re thinking: “But he was just at the top? What happened?” The hows and the whys are there but glossed over so quickly that it can be easy to miss. The relationship between him and the Colonel is the centerpiece of the film, but this is played so over-the-top for so long that by the time we get a good idea of how much the Colonel is controlling everything, we are just as bewildered as Elvis is at how it got this far and this deep. That feels intentional, but it also feels like there is crucial information left out to explain some of what happened. Because of that, the Colonel never feels like a fully fleshed out character.

It is sickening watching the Colonel exploit Elvis, yet that is exactly what happened. There is no doubt in my mind that he contributed heavily to Elvis’s death. I’m sure most people, his family included, feel the same way. This man was a leech, and Tom Hanks plays him as such. Unfortunately, as mentioned above, Tom Hanks feels all wrong for this picture, failing to really portray this person accurately. He gets the slimy, manipulative aspect down pat, but he fails to get the person himself. It’s a near-fatal flaw to an otherwise spectacular picture. When the film soars, though, it soars high.

Academy Award Nominations:

Best Picture: Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin, Gail Berman, Patrick McCormick, and Schuyler Weiss

Best Actor: Austin Butler

Best Sound: David Lee, Wayne Pashley, Andy Nelson, and Michael Keller

Best Production Design: Catherine Martin, Karen Murphy, and Bev Dunn

Best Cinematography: Mandy Walker

Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Mark Coulier, Jason Baird, and Aldo Signoretti

Best Costume Design: Catherine Martin

Best Film Editing: Matt Villa and Jonathan Redmond

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Release Date: June 24, 2022

Running Time: 159 minutes

Rated PG-13

Starring: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Olivia DeJonge, Helen Thomson, and Richard Roxburgh

Directed by: Baz Luhrmann