On paper it seems perfect: Baz Luhrmann and Elvis Presley are a match made in showmanship heaven. Presley’s gaudy and provocative presentations match the penchant for spectacle and excess that defines Luhrmann’s work at its worst. But it also feels incongruous: Luhrmann’s eclectic talents being used for a “birth-to-death” biographical film feels like a potential misuse of his talents. To its credit, and in the tradition of Luhrmann’s typical “muchness”, the film that is “Elvis” is both things. It is a heady, spectacle that finds Luhrmann using the theatrics to good effect, but it is also a film where his ability to wrangle the needs of a biopic often falter in ways that send the film spiralling. To its credit, even when it spirals (and oh how it spirals) “Elvis” always feels like an indelible piece of cinema. There’s always something within the frame that feels compelling enough to wonder at.
What can the new biopic about Elvis reveal to the world? It’s an expected query that might haunt any biopic, fair or not. There have been a handful of explorations of Elvis over the decades, and even as Luhrmann’s emerges as the most expensive, I kept fixating on that question throughout. On the surface, one might draw parallels to Luhrmann’s conceptualisation here within his filmography. Part of his dramatic interest has been swerving from where we expect with familiar properties. His audacious “Romeo + Juliet,” for example, plays around with a centuries old play, purposefully problematising how we think of it. His “The Great Gatsby” is less overtly peculiar, but still retains that same kind of winking disregard for “canon”. So, it makes sense that his “Elvis” feels shorn from the same cloth. The Elvis we know, in a less familiar framework. More than his literary adaptations, “Elvis” holds traces of Luhrmann’s at his creative apex, “Moulin Rouge!”.
Rather than a straightforward tale of his life (at least, at first), “Elvis” is bound to its framing device. In 1997 an ageing, and possibility not quite lucid, Tom Parker lies on his deathbed thinking of his former client, Elvis. He insists to us that the legend that he ruined Elvis’ life was a lie and seeks to clear his name. And with flashing lights and dizzying camerawork he takes us on a journey: this is the story of how a great manager created a star. Or so he claims. The framing device becomes a recurring crutch in “Elvis” but on the surface it offers something that feels distinctly tied to “Moulin Rouge!”. By establishing the story as one about an overzealous manager and his earnest, trapped, star Luhrmann feels reflective here. His pitch for “Elvis” might be: What if “Moulin Rouge!” but Nicole Kidman’s Satine was a pop idol rather than a courtesan-cum-actress who never met her Orpheus-like lover and if her manager was not the empathetic Zidler but a complete monster. And in theory that could work except so many things are just slightly off here, as if Luhrmann is reaching for ideas that need some more contextualising. So, the germ of this framework, which could be compelling, ends up feeling more absurdly grotesque than charming.
In “Elvis”, Luhrmann does not so much have a narrative throughline to communicate as much as he has sensations that he would like us to feel, often best represented in the musical sequences of the film, which are its highpoints (although not necessarily the ones in which Butler performs). This is, of course, Luhrmann’s typical approach to filmmaking in some ways: film as sensation and instinctive rather than narrative. But even when Luhrmann gets accused of style over substance, he’s usually quite clear on what he’s saying. And it’s here that “Elvis” gets murky. It is still very identifiably Luhrmann at work, but it feels identifiably less cogent and thoughtful. The recurring note moving through “Elvis” is an ambivalence on what it wants to say to its audience. Or why it wants to say it.
Luhrmann is credited as director, coproducer and cowriter of the film (Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, and Jeremy Doner also earn writing credits). This makes this “Elvis” very much one created in the image of Baz, and yet my inability to really deign what drew him to this story beyond the flashing lights feels like a liability I can’t ignore. What does he think about Elvis, for example? Or what does Elvis, as played by Austin Butler in his breakout role, think of himself? The film frames itself through the Colonel’s delusions, and yet nothing in the film ever seems to endorse or even empathise with the Colonel. And why should it? The records suggest little to care about. But it’s a peculiarity that a film framed as the Colonel’s memories feel similarly hazy about him as a person? What does the Colonel think of Elvis beyond his potential use as a show-pony? Refracting Elvis (and “Elvis”) through the Colonel allows some level of artifice and myth to define his persona but I’m never sure what drives this man that we spend so much time with. And there is a version where it might work—the grotesque mirror of “Moulin Rouge!” should be a great chance for Luhrmann to argue for art as destructive rather than constructive, the parts are there but then….
The two central performances are not separate from this. As the Colonel, Tom Hanks is unhelpful playing a grotesque parody of a an evil Zidler (a crooked and perverse flip of Jim Broadbent in “Moulin Rouge!”). But the engaging muchness of the role eludes him, or his conceptualisation does. And Austin Butler, earnest and committed, (strangely more emotionally sound when he’s not on singing) can’t quite get a grasp on the interiority of a character who we only understand through others. The reason I keep returning to the “Moulin Rouge!” parallels is that to consider that film intellectually some of the same concerns might emerge. Nicole Kidman’s Satine could, on paper, be considered as similarly flat. But Kidman understands Satine and Luhrmann’s vision in a way that on screen, she becomes complex and full of depth inviting nuance that seems miraculous. As the object of our affection here, I’m never quite convinced that Butler’s Elvis has a concept of his own self. Maybe Elvis having no interiority is the point? Maybe, but…that feels like a back formation where the film explains away its own superficiality. I’m not convinced it works.
Further afield, it’s the brief vignettes of character who we see briefly who feel more tenderly rendered (or at least performed). I kept wanting to return to Kelvin Harrison Jr’s earnest BB King, for example. Harrison Jr is too briefly in the film to be an MVP but he is so wonderfully warm that I want Luhrmann’s film of that man. You can even see Butler working so well with him in moments the film yearns for when he leaves. Or, I kept waiting for Olivia DeJonge’s restless Priscilla to be given more to do, or for Kodi-Smith McPhee’s unctuous Jimmie Rodgers to reappear after his brief scenes in the first 20 minutes, or for David Wenham’s stolid Hank Snow, or even Dacre Montgomery’s slick LA producer, one of the stronger late-film performances. More than anything, I was waiting for us to return to the eclecticism of the first hour of performances from folks like Alton Mason’s Little Richard or Yola’s Sister Rosetta or the recently departed Shonka Dukureh’s Big Mama Thornton. Everything around the two men at the centre feels richer and more rewarding, and I can’t imagine that that’s on purpose in a film that keeps returning to them as often.
But this is Luhrmann, so “Elvis” is never less than committed. Catherine Martin’s visual splendour continues to define Luhrmann’s work and “Elvis” is a visual wonder. I’m less confident about Mandy Walker’s dizzying cinematography, which is important in projecting the freneticism at work here, but sometimes feels like a misdirection for limitations of the script. But even when “Elvis” is low on conceptualisation, it is also so confidently committed to its sensations of its excess that it feels like a truly indelible film in its way, for better and for worse.
Biopics are an easy sell, and “Elvis” benefits from our own knowledge of this contemporary superstar. But, if Luhrmann is best at sensations, it’s a shame he didn’t home in on specific moments in Presley’s life rather than offering a life assessment. The last hour is the film’s weakest, as we keep waiting for the inevitable to come. I longed for the passionate fervour of that first hour. But there’s so much at work here that “Elvis” has moments of spectacular excellence, moments removed from ones that feel ungainly. If I am ambivalent about the film, I can think fondly of it at its heights, like a chilling sequence set to Yola singing “Strange Things Happening Every Day,” where everything truly feels like it’s working together. The film spends the next hour and a half navigating that symmetry. It’s classic Luhrmann, a singular entity in cinema, even as I remain decidedly mixed on the emotional level of his work.
