Baz Luhrmann must have some natural affection for Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s longtime manager. Like Parker, Luhrmann is an outsider who knows a good show when he sees it, and he uses whatever trick he can in order to make sure his audience has a good time. That is why Elvis, the new biopic about Presley, uses Parker’s point of view as a framing reference. He confides and exaggerates about his relationship to the King, lying by omission along the way, and maybe that is necessary because we need an outside observer to truly understand his greatness. It is a gamble that does not exactly pay off, in no small part because Tom Hanks plays Parker, and the performance is the low point of his career.
In the first minutes, jumping back and forward through time at the speed of thought, we only see flashes of Austin Butler, who plays Elvis. Luhrmann teases us, letting us get a sense of his extraordinary gift, so we understand why young women started shrieking the minute he began to perform. His famous hip movements were an unmistakable sexual pantomime, and the film – co-written by Luhrmann and three other screenwriters – suggests this is what made him a star (Parker seemed to have zero interest in Elvis’ musical ability).
At over two-and-a-half hours, Luhrmann dwells on particular episodes of Elvis’ life and skips over others. There is not much interest in his acting career or his more operatic later years. Instead, we see the constant clash between Parker’s desire for mainstream appeal and Elvis’ rebellious streak. It comes to a head during his famous 1968 TV special, and while Elvis stakes out a place for himself in the culture, he never quite understands how Parker can maintain such tight control over him.
The best scenes do not involve Hanks at all because Parker’s presence is relentlessly vulgar. In a fat suit that makes Hanks look a bit like Fat Bastard from the Austin Powers movies, he keeps needling Elvis and tricking his family into one unfair deal after another (only later do we learn that Elvis could not tour abroad because Parker illegally immigrated to the United States). His character is like a vacuum of creativity and imagination, but Hanks’ inherent charm do not help the material. Luhrmann could have cast an overweight person who has little problem depicting ugliness. Brendan Gleeson, who played Donald Trump in “The Comey Rule,” comes immediately to mind.
Whenever Butler is performing with his band or having quieter, dramatic scenes with Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge), there is a conventional musical biopic that connects more than you might expect. Butler does not make Elvis into a caricature or ham it up with his famous quirks. Instead, we get a portrayal of a naturally gifted man who cobbled together his influences into something wholly original. Sometimes the originality would flout convention, like when a younger Elvis unintentionally finds himself the enemy of southern white supremacists, or later in his career where he reimagined his classic songs into a grand spectacle. Luhrmann is never subtle about what he wants to you think, editing these stories in a way to maximize dramatic effect. Anyone who wanted well-researched biographical details may be annoyed by what they see here, but then again, Luhrmann opens with a scene of Parker confiding in us while he’s wearing a hospital gown on a casino floor. Accuracy has left the building.
Luhrmann attempts something interesting with Parker’s confession. The film ends with Elvis’ famous last performance of “Unchained Melody,” his health deteriorated and barely able to hold a performance together. Then Parker tells the audience that we are responsible for his death, not him, because we demanded so much of him. Now does Luhrmann believe this, or is this another Parker rationalization? There is room for both, but the real purpose in the audience’s implication is how Elvis, finally, becomes a wholly tragic figure. That was always the way Elvis had to end, and Luhrmann/Hanks manage to honor him in spite of how they keep indulging their worst impulses.
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