There’s no mystery about a film by Baz Luhrmann. We know it’s going to be big and brassy, fast-moving, wilfully superficial, and packed with over-the-top theatrics. As a result, I go along to each new Baz film with a sense of diminished expectations. For me, everything started to go wrong with Moulin Rouge! (2001), which I watched through gritted teeth. Australia (2008), may be the most embarrassing movie ever to come out of this country, while The Great Gatsby (2013) did a comprehensive hatchet job on one of the seminal novels of the 20th century.
Gatsby is a profound and ultimately tragic story, but tragedy has no traction in Luhrmann’s cinematic universe, fashioned from pure spectacle punctuated by small bursts of melodrama. It might be expected that Elvis Presley, one of the all-time heroes of popular culture, would prove a more congenial subject. To a certain extent, this is true. If all you want from a movie is breathless entertainment, Elvis will provide a satisfactory night at the pictures. For those whose expectations are slightly higher, get ready for a bumpy ride.
Since his death in 1977, at the age of 42, Elvis has inspired a veritable library of books and films. The list runs from Peter Guralnick’s two-volume biography, which could hardly be bettered as an account of the popular music industry, to comic books, conspiracy theories and all forms of pulp trash. Does anybody remember Peter & the Test Tube Babies’ post-punk ditty, Elvis is Dead?
Elvis had a heart attack
‘Cause he got so bleedin’ fat
He weighed nearly half a ton
He looked more like a pregnant mum..
This was the kind of thing that defined Elvis’s reputation for a decade or two, fuelled by memories of his last years in Las Vegas, where he paraded around the stage in a white, rhinestone-studded jump suit and cape, his belly squeezed into a corset, his brain addled with opioids, while he sang “Glory, Glory Hallelujah!”
Of late there has been a concerted effort to rehabilitate the King’s image. Thom Zimny’s 2018 HBO documentary, Elvis Presley: The Searcher, gave us a portrait of a young southern gentleman who spent his life wondering if God had a plan for him. This Elvis loved his mother to distraction and adored all forms of black music, from gospel to rhythm and blues. He was a genuine musical revolutionary who did much to heal America’s perennial racial divide. The blight of his life was his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, who aimed to make Elvis into a middle-brow popular entertainer. It was the Colonel that ensured Elvis would spend a decade making woeful Hollywood movies, and end his career in Las Vegas.
Offered millions of dollars for international tours, the Colonel worked tirelessly to keep Elvis in the United States. As an illegal migrant from the Netherlands with no American passport, he could never travel abroad and keep an eye on his prize client. Las Vegas held a special appeal for the Colonel because of his disastrous gambling habit.
Luhrmann adopts this version of the ‘good’ Elvis, and gives it an extra coating of innocence. At the beginning of their association, Colonel Parker seems to have been a sly old con artist and Elvis a gullible young naïf. Somehow, despite their arguments and ongoing differences, they remained together until the day of Elvis’s death, which suggests the relationship was a deep one. We might see the Colonel as a father-substitute for Elvis’s real dad, Vernon (an unlikely, Richard Roxburgh), who acted as his son’s hapless “business manager”.
In this film the Colonel looms larger than Elvis himself. Not only is he the narrator of the story, the entire narrative is framed as a death-bed flashback, in which the bloated villain gives us his version of events, contradicted at every turn by what we see on screen. One thinks of Milos Forman’s Amadeus, in which an aged Salieri tells us he killed Mozart, even though we don’t believe him. In this instance, the Colonel swears hedidn’t kill Elvis, he made him – although it’s a classsic tale of pure greed doing away with the golden goose.
Tom Hanks enters into the Luhrmann spirit by portraying Colonel Parker as a leering, devious caricature of a carnival spruiker, which may be reasonably accurate. Elvis, the ostensible subject of this bio-pic, is a cypher in comparison. Austin Butler, the young Californian actor who stars in this role, has received generally favourable notices, but the script requires more posing than acting. Butler is proficient at wiggling his hips on stage, but there’s not much sense of an inner life in this portrayal.
To be fair, it’s not Butler’s fault. The story races along at such break-neck speed, complete with jump cuts, vertiginous whirls of the camera, oblique angles, musical interludes, a comic book insert, and on, and on, that caricature is almost the only possible approach. Tom Hanks, old hand that he is, seems to have figured this out straight away.
For a film of more than two-and-a-half hours, the time passes quickly, but it’s like watching a slide show. We follow Elvis’s life story from his hillbilly childhood in Tupelo, Mississippi, to his decadent finale as a (barely) living legend, but the narrative proceeds in fits and starts. Vast tracts of Elvis’s biography are omitted, but when a particular detail attracts the director’s attention, we pause for a little plot development. We have a long, rapturous sequence in which we see the young Elvis developing his love for black music. His time in the army and meeting with Priscilla (Olivia de Jonge) is dispensed with in about five minutes. After they are married, Priscilla barely gets another line.
Fast forward, then pause to find Elvis devastated by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, as if he were being refashioned as an icon of small-l liberalism. The real Elvis was a Republican sympathiser with a passion for guns, as we see in one contradictory sequence in which he gets stoned and shoots up a couple of TV sets.
The big problem is that it’s ridiculous to see Elvis as instrinsically good or bad. Like everyone else he was a complex personality, riddled with contradictions. The Luhrmann method tends to simplify matters. Portrayed as Colonel Parker’s puppet, we never see Elvis as an actual personality. The same applies to everyone else, from Elvis’s parents, to Priscilla, to the bunch of good ole boys that accompanied him everywhere in his final years.
Baz believes that when a point is worth making, it’s best to make it two or three times. Just in case we didn’t realise that the song, Suspicious Minds, was being used in a symbolic sense, he gives us extra chances to get the connection. This penchant for overstatement is characteristic of melodrama and of kitsch, if it’s possible to separate one from the other.
Realism is clearly not Luhrmann’s intention, otherwise he wouldn’t be making a film about America in which most of the cast are Australians trying on a range of dodgy accents. Elvis is pure fairy floss – sickly sweet, colourful, and quick to melt into nothingness. Although music lies at the very heart of Elvis’s story, it’s used in the most scattergun fashion – more cover versions than classic recordings. A great Elvis bio-pic would convey the growing excitement his early gigs generated. Instead, Luhrmann gives us “excitement” in inverted commas – crying girls, flying undies, raised eyebrows, cut, switch, switch again. All the elements are present, but these scenes never fly. Within seconds we’re onto something else. Even those who have never warmed to Elvis would have to admit the King had a great sense of rhythm. That’s not something that could be said about Baz Luhrmann.
Elvis
Directed by Baz Luhrmann
Written by Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner
Starring: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Olivia DeJonge, Richard Roxburgh, Helen Thomson, Kelvin Harrison Jr., David Wenham, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Luke Bracey
Australia/USA, rated M, 159 mins
Published in the Australian Financial Review, 25 June, 2022