Elvis will largely depend on how you feel about Baz Luhrmann's brash and brilliant maximalism. Just the hyper-caffeinated establishment section, even before Austin Butler's locomotive hips start doing their jerky thing as Elvis Presley takes the stage to perform "Heartbreak Hotel" in a rockabilly-chic pink suit, leaves you giddy with his frenetic blast. . of blazing colors, split screen, retro graphics, and more edits per scene than the human eye can count. Add in the layered, mind-blowing sound design and this is Baz times a bazillion.
If the writing rarely lives up to the stunning visual impact, the director's affinity for his leading lady is contagious and exhausting. Luhrmann's taste for pop operatic spectacle is evident throughout, resulting in a film that revels in moments of grand melodrama as well as in theatrical artifice and vigorously entertaining acting.
Stars: Tom Hanks, Austin Butler, Olivia DeJonge
As for the big question of whether Butler could pull off the masquerade as one of the most indelible icons in the history of American pop culture, the answer is a resounding yes. His stage moves are sexy and hypnotic, his wistful, lost mama's boy quality is stunning, capturing the tragic paradox of a phenomenal success story that tenaciously clings to the American Dream even as it continues to crumble at his hands.
But the heart of this biopic is tainted, thanks to a script whose choppy patchwork feel perhaps directly correlates to its complicated billing: Baz Luhrmann & Sam Bromell and Baz Luhrmann & Craig Pearce and Jeremy Doner; story of Baz Luhrmann and Jeremy Doner. That tidbit suggests an amalgamation of various versions, though the big stumbling block is the unsavory character driving the narrative, which creates a hole in the middle.
That would be "Colonel" Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks in possibly the least engaging performance of his career: a luridly leering look from under a mountain of latex, with a gruff, unidentifiable accent that becomes no less unnerving even after. The character's murky Dutch origins have been revealed. It is a great risk to tell his story through the prism of a morally repugnant egoist, a financial abuser who used his manipulative carnival robber skills to control and exploit his vulnerable star attraction, driving him to exhaustion and draining him of an outsized proportion of his earnings. .
Each time the action returns to Parker from Hanks near the end of his life, refuting his appointed role as the villain in the story of a Las Vegas casino where he racked up gambling debts that required keeping Elvis under a lucrative residency contract in an international hotel. — the film wobbles. As shown here and elsewhere, Parker was an egotistical con man who monopolized the star's artistic and personal freedom and now monopolizes the narrative of his life. Elvis the Movie works better when Elvis the Man is a figment of emcee Luhrmann's feverish imagination than when Parker keeps popping up to remind us, "I created Elvis Presley."
The subject's musical background is illustrated in a pleasantly flowery southern gothic style as young Elvis (Chaydon Jay) is seen growing up in Tupelo, Mississippi, moving to a poor black neighborhood after his father, Vernon (Richard Roxburgh), is jailed. briefly for passing a bad check.
Peering through cracks in the walls of juke joints or under the flaps of holy-roller revival tents, Elvis absorbs influences that would allow him to fuse bluegrass with R&B, gospel and country, creating a sound without precedents of a white vocalist. In an amusingly wild flourish, the roots of the "lewd twists" that would inflame screaming fans and conservative watchdogs in their respective guises can be traced back to the boy physically possessed by the spirit during a church service.
As they did in The Great Gatsby and elsewhere, Luhrmann and longtime music supervisor Anton Monsted freely mix period and contemporary tunes once teenage Elvis, his family now relocated to Memphis, begins hanging out in Beale Street, where he befriends the young B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and is moved by the gospel sounds of Sister Rosetta Tharpe (English musician Yola).