THE LIGHTER SIDE I’m all shook up over Elvis

Ido not claim to be a film critic, but I feel I have a valid point to make about certain film criticisms. These comments were inspired by seeing Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis recently.

Cinema-goers should know by now that by going to a Luhrmann film, they are entering a flamboyant cinematic world of bold colour and movement, zany zooms, rapid-fire editing, and bold (even outrageous) costuming.

They should know that they will experience a flagrant disregard for naturalism, a trademark Luhrmann firmly established in Strictly Ballroom (1992).

Perhaps, therefore, if people don’t like those things, they would be better off staying home and reading a book.

But the main point I wish to make is about critics’ claims that the film was an inaccurate portrayal of Elvis and his life. ‘They left out such and such, they didn’t dwell on this or that’; something or other else wasn’t right.

It seems that these people were looking for a documentary. No — it is a screenplay created by an artist. When made into a movie, it should transport you into another world, in which you suspend your disbelief and let loose your senses.

What the artist presents is what he or she wants to present in his or her own inimitable style. It is a work of art in itself.

No doubt these people would also criticise van Gogh’s The Starry Night as being an inaccurate portrayal of the night sky. But it is certainly an effective and powerful portrayal of the artist’s mental turmoil.

I try not to read the critics before I see a film, as that can so easily colour your view. But after seeing Elvis I was keen to read the reviews, and most, by far, were extremely favourable. The few unfavourable ones tended to dwell on this accuracy idea.

Decades ago, the same happened with Amadeus. A New Zealand music academic criticised it as not being an accurate portrayal of Wolfgang’s life. Sorry, but he had clearly missed out on the joyous experience of being transported into a cinematic world with music that is hard to match.

I suppose I was a little biased about

Elvis because I’m a Luhrmann fan anyway. So, when many accused him of “trashing” Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, I was in the other camp; it was the very outrageousness of it that appealed to me.

And when he had the audacity to modify the ending — Luhrmann gives the famous lovers a moment of realisation of what they had done —

I could only applaud him. My feeling was that Baz Luhrmann had actually improved Shakespeare!

Elvis – already long at two hours and 40 minutes – could not possibly hope to cover everything in the star’s life, but it is purely Luhrmann’s choice, as screenplay-writer and director, which pieces to show.

So we were given brief but satisfying glimpses of the musical influences in his boyhood, plenty of hip gyrations and screaming fans during his early fame, and enough shots of adults outraged at his pelvic performances for us to get the picture and be entertained at the same time.

There was little more than a fleeting suggestion of the overweight Elvis, but there was certainly plenty of the control his manager (superbly played by Tom Hanks) had over him to leave an appropriately bad taste in our mouths. We saw what Luhrmann wanted to show us, the way he wanted to show it.

And it would be remiss of me not to praise the stellar performance of Austin Butler as The King himself.

An accurate documentary it wasn’t; a cinematic experience it certainly was. It was, in short, what a film should be.