ALL SHOOK UP
Lurid depiction of Elvis a dizzying, roiling and occasionally inspiring churn-up
The best way to appreciate Elvis, Baz Luhrmann's audacious, frenetic, occasionally astonishing and ultimately confounding movie about Elvis Presley, is simply to surrender to it.
The result is a dizzying, almost hallucinatory experience — akin to being thrown into a washing machine and mercilessly churned. That isn't to say that Elvis doesn't provide moments of insight, or even genuine inspiration; it's just that they occur fitfully, when the viewer is briefly pasted up against the window before being plunged into the barrel of Luhrmann's lurid sensibility once again.
The story of Presley's life is narrated by his manager,
Col. Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks behind layers of prosthetics and a heavy Dutch accent. Jovial, conniving and defiantly amoral, Parker makes for a sulphurous and tiresome guide through Presley's life story.
During his formative years, young Elvis (Chaydon Jay) watches transfixed as Black patrons of a Tupelo juke joint writhe deliriously to Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, then runs to a nearby Pentecostal revival tent where he's mesmerized by the preaching. Luhrmann intercuts the scenes with jacked-up intensity, framing Presley's love for Black music and culture as seduction and spiritual conversion. It's a blunt, unsubtle but also thrilling scene whose momentum is oddly stopped cold by a cut to Presley — now portrayed by Austin Butler — performing at the Louisiana Hayride in 1954. As the Colonel explains, the Black voice in a white body, combined with Presley's distinctive stage presence made Presley “the greatest carnival act I'd ever seen.”
The narrative arc of Elvis often feels like it's been lifted from Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley. Parker, a carnival worker whose showmanship and talent for the short con earned him the nickname “The Snowman,” is portrayed as a schemer who sees Presley as ripe for exploitation.
In rapid succession, using dramatized and real-life news clips, Luhrmann revisits the highs, lows and dismal depths of Presley's life, including his sudden stardom, the furor over his sexuality and “race mixing,” his stint in the Army, his marriage to Priscilla (Olivia Dejonge), his movie career, his decline during the British Invasion, his 1968 comeback special, his residency in Las Vegas, and his descent into drug addiction and exhaustion. Luhrmann re-enacts it all with fealty overlaid with funhouse overstatement, an approach that starts to feel as stifling as Parker's merchandising gimmicks.
Just as Parker took 50 per cent of Presley's earnings, he commandeers at least half the movie, butting into the story with glint-eyed asides and oppressive voice-overs. Luhrmann takes admirable risks in Elvis, including the use of present-day covers of Presley hits by the likes of Doja Cat, Kacey Musgraves and Jack White, but nearly every choice has the effect of disorienting and distancing audiences rather than immersing them.
To paraphrase the title of Todd Haynes's Bob Dylan movie, which used similar techniques to more meaningful effect: The problem with Elvis is that he's not there. Luhrmann is moving so fast, with such mannered, overbearing self-consciousness, that Butler can barely get a hip swivel in edgewise, let alone a fully realized characterization. He does his own singing during Presley's formative years, and he does an admirable job of capturing the intoxication and terror of his nascent stardom. But he's being put through the paces by a filmmaker who turns out to be just as controlling as Parker himself.
It's tempting to theorize that Luhrmann is temperamentally more attracted to Parker as a protagonist as a fellow martinet, but the Colonel is really the lens through which the filmmaker is examining a broader theme: the freak show of fandom. Continually thwarted from giving his character anything resembling an inner life, Butler's Presley threatens to get lost in an engulfing spectacle of bloat, sweat and adoring girls' tears. But something uncanny happens once Parker installs him at the International Hotel in Las Vegas.
By now, Butler is lip-synching to Presley's actual vocals.
But his embodiment of the character has reached another level, where every secret smile and bit of swagger feels like it's being channelled rather than performed. Karate-chopping and chomp-chomping his way through Suspicious Minds, Butler turns what could have been yet another impression of the most imitated musician of all time into something authentic and unexpectedly powerful.
Then it's back into Luhrmann's tumbling barrel. Vegas, of course, marks the beginning of the end in Elvis, which concludes with Presley himself singing Unchained Melody soon before his death. It's a haunting coda: sad and soaring, tragic and eerily timeless. And it inadvertently suggests that the preceding movie was a sideshow all along. There was always going to be only one Elvis, and he's long since left the building.