Elvis is a blast-you-back-into-your-seat gobsmack cotton candy spectacular that is a worthy homage to The King's Memphis roots
Crotty's review of Baz Lurhman's Elvis.
For the entirety of the pandemic, we've had to endure an onslaught of preachy drivel masquerading as important filmmaking. Baz Luhrman's Elvis marks the return of genuine pan-generational, pan-ethnic entertainment to the silver screen.
In this visual masterpiece, the glitzy Australian auteur is back to his Moulin Rouge! acrobatics with insanely innovative editing, music, and sound. He gets a revelatory performance out of Austin Butler as "EP" (the new John Travolta by my reckoning) and strong secondary turns from sundry characters in the broader Elvis orbit. A cameo by Alton Mason as Little Richard playing “Tutti Frutti” almost steals the show. You are left concluding, correctly, and without too much preachiness, that sans black gospel and blues there would be no Elvis Presley.
Most originally, Luhrman drills down with remarkable specificity to the sheer intoxicating sex appeal of Elvis to his fawning, often female, fans. In the triptych framing of many musical scenes, you are drawn right into the disruptive Dionysian power of this remarkable performer from various perspectives. The segregationist powers that be saw the inherent danger in Presley's interracial appeal and sought to put a quick stop to it. This is ground that the film covers well, though a bit stripped of the sick evil at the heart of it. I have to think that things got more out of hand than the film lets on.
Unfortunately, Tom Hanks as the managerial baddie at the heart of the story, the erstwhile Colonel Tom Parker, comes across as overwrought and one-dimensional––more of a Dutch goofball than the sinister con man he is meant to be. Another actor with a current of pure evil pulsing through his veins could have given the role a darker, subtler, more beguiling hue. As a result, Elvis seems at times more hagiography and caricature than the full truth. But given the nature of most musical biopics—largely trucking in broad brush strokes of good and evil—this is hardly a fatal flaw. An unflinching Oliver-Stone-like look into the maudlin, chaotic, conflicted and ultimately paranoid Elvis soul this is not!
Nevertheless, in a movie about two master showmen, always au courant Luhrman shows he is more than up to the challenge. Though twenty minutes too long, his Elvis is a blast-you-back-into-your-seat gobsmack cotton candy spectacular that is a worthy homage to The King's Memphis roots.
See it.