(IMAGE: Warner Bros. Discovery)
Warner Bros. 2022. Drama / Biography. 159 minutes.
RATING: 4 out of 4
Watching Baz Luhrmann’s long-anticipated Elvis is a lot like watching a man desperately running to catch a bus — exerting himself beyond any sane pain threshold until, finally, against impossible odds, he manages to pull himself onboard where he is able to recover in comfort and safety. Without the satisfaction of the latter, there is no joy in the former — which is precisely why most people don’t deliberately place themselves in such situations. Artists, on the other hand, frequently do — especially when they’re obsessive, high-wire act auteurs like the Australian Luhrmann. Anyone who has followed Baz’s career from his 1992 debut with Strictly Ballroom through such wildly uneven, reach-for-the-stars efforts as William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge, Australia and The Great Gatsby can already imagine what’s in store for them with Elvis — even though, as with Luhrmann’s previous films, knowing what’s in store isn’t the same as being prepared for what’s in store. That’s because Luhrmann, who turns sixty in less than three months, has spent half his life making a paltry total of six films. He is known as an obsessive, meticulous, single-minded and relentless perfectionist. Insofar as that perfectionism has narrowed his output — it has also elevated his commercial success, with four of his five previous films ranking among the ten most popular Australian films of all time (Romeo +Juliet being the outlier). That’s an undeniably extraordinary feat in a nation which has produced such legendary, world class filmmakers as Peter Weir, George Miller and Bruce Beresford among others. The secret to Baz’s success, of course, is that he always catches the bus. For all their stressful and anxiety-inducing stylistic excess, Lurhmann’s films somehow always find a heart inside the ostentatious superficiality which has become his signature. There may one day come a time when the bus escapes his grasp and audiences are left with little but a manic, unrewarding assault on their senses — but that moment will not be now. Despite grappling with a months-long delay after co-star Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson were infected with COVID-19 less than a week before the start of principal photography, Elvis may well be Luhrmann’s best and most commercial film to date. It’s by no means perfect — it still struggles under the weight of Luhrmann’s indulgent style through large sections of its whopping 159-minute running time — but for all its narrative clunkiness and overwrought execution, in the end Elvis still pulls itself on the bus, delivering the kind of exhilarating, star-studded emotional payoff which studio films all but abandoned some twenty years ago.
Luhrmann’s aesthetic, for better or worse, is an undying affection for gaudiness as art — kitsch elevated to grand melodrama. That this would lead him inexorably to Elvis — particularly late-stage Elvis — feels oddly fitting if not inevitable. It’s clear, too, that Luhrmann has been paying attention to the trajectory of musical biopics over the years — including and especially those involving Elvis. Since The Buddy Holly Story in 1978, most music industry biopics have been pretty much like most other biopics — Great Balls of Fire!, Ray, La Bamba, What’s Love Got to Do With It?, Selena etc. Recent years, however, have seen a greater willingness to engage in narrative and stylistic risk-taking with such films as Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman leading the way. Rather than follow the conventional contours of the artist’s life, with music filling in the spaces, Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman inverted the formula — structuring their stories to the contours of the music while taking broad historical and biographic license to shoehorn any remaining factual material into the grooves between the tracks (that’s a vinyl analogy, for those who need help keeping up). Given the tumult and breadth of Elvis’ life compared to the fairly clean linearity of his musical trajectory, applying such an approach to “The King” himself seems only natural. When it’s mixed with Luhrmann’s natural impulses, things get tricky… and supremely interesting. For a figure as legendary as Elvis, it’s significant that there has been no attempt at a definitive screen biopic until now. While Elvis has shown up as a supporting or mythical figure in a variety of other fact-based and fictitious films, there have been only been three prior dedicated biographical efforts of note — all of them made for television: John Carpenter’s 1979 Elvis, starring Kurt Russell as Elvis Presley and Pat Hingle as Colonel Tom Parker, the 2005 CBS miniseries Elvis, starring Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as Elvis and Randy Quaid as Colonel Parker, and the deeply underrated 1990 ABC episodic series Elvis, which starred a largely unknown Michael St. Gerard as a young Elvis Presley on the verge of super-stardom. Luhrmann has clearly seen them all — judiciously electing to avoid their missteps while embracing and magnifying their merits.
The challenge to any depiction of Elvis Presley is in capturing both the man and the performer in a credible, convincing way while stopping short of coming off like an Elvis impersonator. The larger and more mythic the persona, the greater the risk of self-parody — and they simply don’t come much bigger than Elvis Presley. The Carpenter film warrants attention merely because it was the first of its kind, airing on ABC scarcely eighteen months after Elvis’ death. Russell’s performance, however, ages poorly — so much so that Russell himself didn’t shy from subtly spoofing it in the 2001 action film 3000 Miles to Graceland. The 2005 miniseries is noteworthy only for its attempt at a more complete telling of the tale — but otherwise misses the key beats by a wide berth. Only the mostly forgotten 1990 series — which aired only ten of its thirteen filmed episodes before cancellation — came close to capturing who Elvis Presley really was, as opposed to whom the public, largely through the efforts of his shadowy, unscrupulous manager, Colonel Tom Parker, imagined him to be. One might lay credit for that with Priscilla Presley, who created and produced the series to set the record straight about the man she knew better than anyone else. Or one might give ample credit to star Michael St. Gerard, who was cast based on his uncanny resemblance to the young Presley and his equally uncanny incarnation of him in two feature films the prior year: Heart of Dixie and Great Balls of Fire!. Either way, anyone fortunate enough to have seen that series during its truncated run in 1990 will immediately feel it echoing in Luhrmann’s Elvis — with certain shots and even entire sequences eerily replicated. (As it happens, our very own Ray Greene worked on the show and has written a beautiful remembrance of it here.)
This is not to accuse Luhrmann of plagiarism — quite the contrary, it acknowledges that his years of researching and digesting all things Elvis simply refined what had previously worked while discarding that which did not. Which now brings us to what Luhrmann’s film is — and isn’t. Biopics centered on extremely public figures run the risk of simply dramatizing events with which the public is already familiar — one of the central problems of Michael Mann’s otherwise superbly-crafted 2001 Ali. Luhrmann’s solution to the problem is to tell the story not from a neutral point of view, but from the point of view of the least public and most mysterious figure in Elvis lore — the man most responsible for Elvis’ success as well as his demise, the one figure about whom very little is still widely known: Colonel Tom Parker. Previous portrayals of Parker — by Pat Hingle in the Carpenter film and Randy Quaid in the 2005 miniseries — were competent but largely cosmetic depictions of the persona Parker allowed the public to see in selected glimpses. The 1990 series — which was set just prior to Elvis’ partnership with Parker — depicted him only in the shadows. The quarter century since Parker’s passing, however, has seen volumes of new information emerge, all of which sheds remarkable new light on the lives of both Elvis and Parker — and furnishes fuel for Luhrmann’s surprisingly adept, if imbalanced, film.
Tom Hanks’ bejoweled Parker, of course, is no more accurate an approximation than were his depictions of Walt Disney or Fred Rogers — but Hanks being Hanks, it is an undeniably compelling characterization. A blubbery mass of venality, greed, avarice and narcissism tempered by a genuine paternalistic pride in his star client, the notorious carny-turned-legendary music manager often feels like a part a younger M. Emmet Walsh was born to play — but in this instance, it’s Hanks’ star power and intangible flair for creating unforgettable screen characterizations which is of paramount importance as Luhrmann frames the first part of the film exclusively around Parker’s seedy little world of traveling carny folk and regionally semi-famous singers. It’s a world so sad and distasteful that when Elvis (Austin Butler) finally appears within it, the audience cannot help but share in Parker’s sense of discovery. It’s not quite Walter Huston dancing over his discovery of gold in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but it feels at least as momentous. The film’s early segments also afford Luhrmann the opportunity — through convoluted but still effective flashbacks — to set the record straight on aspects of Elvis’ artistic evolution which only the 1990 series previously addressed, namely his deep and profound relationship to the black community and musical artists with whom he grew up — the great pioneers in both gospel and blues whose too-often unheralded efforts inspired and helped shape the sound Elvis would later popularize throughout the world. The degree to which Elvis interfaced with specific figures is treated with maximum license — but they are the key figures just the same, from Big Mama Thornton (the first to record Hound Dog) to B.B. King (a too brief cameo by the immensely talented Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Little Richard and Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup.
The unlikely fusion of fate and circumstance that elevate Elvis Presley from this cultural milieu and hurl him into the orbit of Col. Tom Parker receives a predictably Lurhmannesque treatment — a furiously edited macro-montage of faces, places and events which hurtles backwards and forwards through time, hastily folding in incidents from Elvis’ family life, his meteoric rise to fame, his untimely military conscription and service in Germany, his triumphant return, Hollywood movie career, marriage to Priscilla and, finally, his fall from musical grace. It’s an exhausting piece of cinema, equal parts brilliant and haphazard, which consumes more than an hour of the picture’s running time. While there is much to praise in this first half of the picture, it’s hard to call it truly successful — it’s Luhrmann running for the bus, exerting himself admirably and earning the audience’s plaudits for the effort — without a payoff. Butler, too, is caught in the same dilemma — despite flawlessly capturing Elvis’ voice and physical mannerisms, his is a more smoldering, angsty sexuality which can’t quite evoke the one element of Presley’s success which is never given sufficient attention: Elvis was beautiful. What Michael St. Gerard brought to the 1990 series, Butler can only hint at here — but there’s scarcely time to grouse about it as Luhrmann barrels through the years, dispensing with Elvis’ entire Hollywood movie career in a matter of minutes before finally pulling the plug on both the film’s heretofore frenetic pace — and Elvis’ popularity.
And then… Luhrmann and Butler catch the bus.
The end of Elvis’ movie career, the beginning of his marriage to longtime girlfriend Priscilla and the seeming end of his recording career all roughly coincide in 1967, which is where this first portion of the film stops to catch its breath. Having blown through some thirteen years in little over an hour, Luhrmann finally arrives at what one imagines to be the point of inception for the entire effort: NBC’s Elvis Presley: ‘68 Comeback Special. Luhrmann would have been about six years old at the time, and while Elvis famously never toured outside the United States (a major dramatic point in the film), his resurrected popularity at this point in time, coupled with burgeoning satellite technology which propelled his live performances throughout the globe, would surely have put him on an impressionable young Australian boy’s radar. As Elvis reinvents himself in the style and tenor of the times, his relationship to Parker shows its first signs of stress — and Luhrmann’s film suddenly comes alive. For a solid half hour — nearly half the running time of the actual comeback special — Luhrmann and Butler meticulously recreate one of the most legendary television broadcasts of all time, weaving in a backstage drama that shows Elvis coming into his own, comfortable in his own skin, confident in his choices and no longer intimidated by Parker’s manipulations. This is Elvis in black leather and lamb chops, tan and toned, ready for a new beginning.
As the film segues gracefully into the last and most tumultuous period of Elvis’ life — the flamboyant Vegas years which would bring his career and life to an untimely end — Luhrmann’s storytelling finds its thematic and musical payoffs, Butler’s performance elevates, Hanks’ aging, malign Parker degenerates and audiences settle in for the home stretch. Unlike previous tellings, however, Luhrmann’s film is able to find meaning in Elvis’ tragically truncated life — ably aided by Oscar-worthy work from cinematographer Mandy Walker, editors Matt Villa and Jonathan Redmond and a dazzling, if overstuffed soundtrack which takes broad liberties with often unconventional arrangements of the Elvis songbook, Elvis is neither a routine biopic nor a routine musical, but rather what is sometimes pretentiously dubbed a “psychobiography,” a study guided by psychology and the subject’s interior life more than linear narrative or a simple recounting of external events. For the first time, there’s a sense that one isn’t just watching Elvis — but that one finally understands Elvis — and in the process finally understands Baz Luhrmann. However taxing it may be to catch that bus — there can be no doubt that it reaches its destination — and that’s saying a lot for a wide-release studio film in 2022. As one of the first, and most risky new releases for the combined Warner Bros. Discovery, Luhrmann’s film has a lot riding on it. If successful, it could be the proverbial prodigal return to an era when studios made movies first and foremost for grown-ups — the long-awaited antidote to the effrontery of Marvel. If not, it could herald a long post-COVID winter for more thoughtful big-budget fare. Audiences will decide. Here’s hoping they choose wisely.
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