The first time we see the title character of the movie, Elvis, he is stepping out of the shadows and onto a stage in Louisiana, ready to perform for a crowd totally unaware that they are about to witness the crowning of a king. The audience smelled blood when the 19-year-old was dressed in pink from shoulders to ankle. The opening notes of Baby, Let's Play House are written by Elvis Presley and as he belts andstrums, his body lurches and thrusts. He moves so fast that the electric current goes through the entire venue and wakes the young women in attendance with his suggestive country-preacher antics.
This is a star-is-born moment in a movie. Luhrmann stages the sequence with a carnival barker flair that pushes it past cliché, on to parody, and then beyond that still, to a frenzy of cartoon hysteria. The song is embellished with a thunderbolt of electric guitar, which compromises historical realism on the altar of arena-rock glory. The girls aren't just screaming. As if possessed by the spirit of Presley, they explode into a kind of uncontrollable rapture. Luhrmann goes for the heights of myth: The rise of a radio god as a one-man sexual revolution, releasing all the angst of America's youth and halving history in the process.
Elvis is dominated by that type of energy. There are 25 years of bullet points in the life and career of the bestselling solo recording artist of all time connected in the movie. Luhrmann is not a hall-of-FAme historian. From the beginning, he cuts the music biopic into a frenzy, caricaturing its familiar beats, tackling its obligations through a flurry of headlines and crowd shots and split-screen action. Elvis is structured in such a way that it's almost three hours long. There aren't many scenes as suites. It's moving.
The MTV approach may be as strategic as it is pathological. Elvis can only tell elements of its true story through implication and shorthand if it covers all the ground. It is the rise to fame. The fight against moral scolds is ongoing. The backlash to Elvis is basically the singer's Dylan-goes-electric moment in reverse. Elvis goes through everything. The King's career in Hollywood is limited to a single film. His service overseas is completely missed.
The initial relationship between Elvis and his exploitative manager, Colonel TomParker, is the dramatic center of the show. The script is an obvious patchwork of drafts by Luhrmann and other people. His discovery that the million-dollar voice on the radio belongs to a white man is accompanied by a hilarious smash zoom into Hanks's face, hidden by a fake nose and animated with shock and the lust ofopportunity. The Faustian pitch at the top of the Ferris wheel was made by the man who ended up seducing Elvis. Elvis losing his virginity with shots of his mother is one of many cuts in this innocence lost story.
The commercial potential in Presley's culture was calculated by the way he repackaged the Black artists he listened to in his youth for a white audience. Luhrmann cuts to footage of a child watching a performance by Arthur "Big Boy" Presley in the movie "Elvis", which foregrounds that part of the musician's rags-to-riches story. A sequence depicts Elvis walking between white and black America, at home on the lawn of a plantation and on the street. The film shows how conservatives were afraid of Elvis' exaggerated sexuality and the Black culture that he was exploiting.
The film is narrated by a man who insists that Elvis' decline and death were a result of his dedication to putting on a show, even as what we see puts the blame for his decline on his manager. That could be a clever way to frame the story around the unreliable statements of the villain. Hanks is an abysmal performer in the role. It makes sense that the casting would weaponize the most trustworthy Hollywood star into a manipulation tactic. Even a movie that is outrageously heightened can't support the fat-suit absurdity of Hanks's performance, which compounds ghoulish Austin Powers makeup with a truly bizarre, vaudeville Nordic accent. The film tilts precariously close to sketch comedy because Hanks is too ridiculous to take seriously.
The performance is all swagger and pinup-boy posturing, with much more attitude than psychology. It suits a movie with more interest in the legend of Elvis than the actual person he was. Luhrmann's conception of rock history as a game of telephone is reinforced by the fact that Butler sometimes resembles not so much Elvis as any number of flash-in-the-pan acts indebted to the artist's style
The film asserts that Elvis is everywhere and that it uses a soundtrack that slows down and airs out big hits like "Fools Rush In" to make up for its lack of pop-culture references. The director of Moulin Rouge used hip-hop and covers of The King to highlight how Elvis's act of appropriation is just one chapter in the twisting path of American popular music. The film tried to place Elvis against the background of mid-century breaking news, but it failed. It's possible that Hanks is still around to strengthen the associations of a script that occasionally wanders to a television set and the assassinations reported on it.
The film runs out of steam after two hours. The downfall of Elvis was when he ran out of comebacks, got hooked on pills, and became a prisoner of his casino residency in Las Vegas. Luhrmann sucks all of the wild-man enthusiasm out of his material when he dramatizes the last act of this life. The last act is a foregone conclusion.
There is a place where it comes alive before that. There is an approximation of a luminary that gels with Luhrmann's cut-a-secondness to produce something like a monument to the mythology ofElvis. Luhrmann wants to know how we can measure the life of this figure through something other than a head-spinning spectacle. The excess of his vision shifts from tiring to exciting.
The movie "Elvis" opens in theaters on June 24. Visit his Authory page for more reviews and writing by A.A.
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