‘Elvis’ feels like being in a washing machine for 2½ hours
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.
Luhrmann, best known for such kaleidoscopic fantasias as “Romeo and Juliet” and “Moulin Rouge!,” possesses just enough hubris to believe himself capable of re-creating the lightning that Elvis Presley embodied, and that continued to make him a pop culture icon decades after his 1977 death. With “Elvis,” Luhrmann matches Presley’s drive and instinctive charisma and raises him for sheer nerve, simultaneously hewing to the hoariest conventions of Hollywood rise-and-fall biopics and seeking to gleefully subvert them at every turn.
The result is a dizzying, almost hallucinatory experience — akin to being thrown into a washing machine and mercilessly churned for 2½ hours. 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 most interesting conceit of “Elvis,” which Luhrmann cowrote with Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce and Jeremy Doner, also happens to be its biggest weakness: 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. (Born in the Netherlands, Andreas van Kuijk took the name “Tom Parker” upon enlisting in the U.S. Army in 1929. The honorary “colonel” came later, in return for his help with the campaign of Louisiana Gov. Jimmie Davis.)
Jovial, conniving and defiantly amoral, Parker makes for a sulfurous and, frankly, tiresome guide through Presley’s life story, which Luhrmann illustrates with a bricolage of musical numbers, set pieces and melodramatic encounters, at one point throwing in an animated sequence taken from the comic books Elvis read as a child.
During his formative years, young Elvis ( Chaydon Jay) watches transfixed as African American patrons of a Tupelo juke joint writhe deliriously to Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, then runs to a nearby Pentecostal revival tent where he’s just as mesmerized by the preaching.
Luhrmann intercuts the scenes with jacked-up intensity, framing Presley’s love for Black music and
conversion. ( Crudup is played by Gary Clark Jr. B.B. King, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Big Mama Thornton and Little Richard are played by Kelvin Harrison Jr., Yola, Shonka Dukureh and Alton Mason, respectively.) 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.
“Elvis” is aware that the audience knows exactly where this is all going. In rapid succession, using dramatized and real- life news clips, Luhrmann revisits the highs, lows and most dismal depths of Presley’s life, including his sudden stardom, the ensuing 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.
Luhrmann takes some admirable risks in “Elvis,” including the use of presentday covers of Presley hits, but nearly every choice he makes has the effect of disorienting and distancing audiences rather than immersing them.