Film Review - Elvis (12A)

 We are the same, you and I. We are two odd, lonely children reaching for eternity.

Elvis Presley and director Baz Luhrmann are a match ordained in the cinematic stars. Since 1992's Strictly Ballroom the Australian director has helmed just six feature films and tends to cherry-pick subjects that fit his vivid style. His Romeo + Juliet boils with the hormonal-teen passions of Shakespeare's famous tragedy, while Moulin Rouge! and The Great Gatsby are fuelled by two periods of historic decadence - fin de siecle Paris and America's Jazz Age respectively. It makes total sense then that he's taken on the cultural revolution that occurred when a charismatic boy from Tupelo, Mississippi brought the energy of African American music to a stunned and euphoric white audience. The outcome is a film as explosive as what happened in audience's heads the first time they witnessed Rock and Roll's 'King'.

Setting aside issues of style, your modern biopic needs an angle to avoid the tedium of a 'this happened then that happened' narrative. The spine of this Elvis tale is the entertainer's relationship with his career-long manager Colonel Tom Parker, played with a creepily insidious charm by Tom Hanks. Framed as Parker's fourth-wall breaking defence regarding why he's 'not the villain of this here story', it flashes from the end of Elvis' life back to the fateful first meeting between the two - a gauche lead singer in a rural rhythm-and-blues band and a self-styled impresario looking for his ticket to the top. What follows is a stratospheric rise for both (Elvis gets famous here before we have time to breathe) and the consequent struggle between an artist who increasingly seeks to make his own choices, and the manager who views him primarily - and unsurprisingly - as a cash cow. Therein lies the tale's ultimate tragedy.

That's the story. As for the telling, this movie is as Lurhmann-esque as it gets, the director having finessed his style into its purest form to date. If you don't know, that means high energy sound-and-vision montage - a film crafted as much in the editing suite as on location, so that it pummels the audience's senses almost continuously. The result is either exhilarating or exhausting, or both, depending on your preferences as a viewer. Take an early sequence that ties Elvis' signature style with his childhood visit to a black pentecostal revival meeting - implying that his 'rubber legs' stage performance channels that religious euphoria from his youth. It's not a concept easily conveyed in words, but Luhrmann's brilliance lies in getting us inside his protagonists' subjective experiences, particularly in moments that blow their minds and shape their worlds. And we're left in no doubt through the melee of sound and vision as to how profoundly the youngster's childhood experience has shaped the man gyrating in the loose-fit pink suit. It's thrilling, for sure, and that moment alone leaves you pretty spent.

The rhythms of the film allow occasional breathers, but this is the story of a famously committed and energetic performer spinning in a cultural maelstrom, so such hiatuses are few. Plus, the mayhem of Elvis' story is enhanced by a central performance that compliments Luhrmann's dynamism entirely. While Austin Butler is tried on TV and turned in a darkly magnetic performance in Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Elvis has proved a star-making ascent as steep in trajectory as Presley's during 1956. It's one of the year's truly remarkable big-screen turns: Butler doesn't so much play Elvis as live, breathe and sweat him, never more so than in a clutch of iconic stage sequences. No direction or cinematic craft could compensate for second best in this regard, and it's the lead actor's ardour and force of personality that bring moments like Elvis' discovery at the Louisiana Hayride and his '68 Comeback Special to such arresting life. Charm, sexuality, earnestness and vulnerability - it's all here, emanating from Butler's core and aided in no small measure by his vocal chops. By this time next year he may well have rocked his hips to Oscar glory.

If acclaim for Butler seems universal, Hanks as Parker has proved more polarising. Maybe it's because we're not used to Hollywood's favourite everyman in a such a grotesque character role, maybe because his choices lean into the shadowy aspects of a man who in real life stayed shrouded in mystery. His 'Colonel' is an odd, goblin-like creation, leeching the life from a man who had so much. There's a whole lot of pantomime villain here, but in the expressionist context of the film it worked - for me at least. 

There's much else going on here - this is one big film, ambitious in its scale and intoxicating in its evocation of a conflicted and rapidly changing America. In terms of theme it's punching heavy as well. Along with its preoccupation with the struggle between artistry and commerce, there's the tension between the ordinary mortal and the icon, and a significant racial element that weaves the Elvis phenomenon with African American origins more tightly than some have argued is strictly accurate. (Whatever the case, portrayals in the movie of B. B. King, Little Richard and Big Mama Thornton are welcome, and hugely entertaining.) 

Where Elvis succeeds undeniably and completely is in conveying the appeal of the performer, and explaining in a way no words could match why the skinny white kid now at rest in Graceland, Tennessee exerted such a powerful hold over the fans who loved him. (He still does, if the reaction of the ladies seated behind me in the theatre is anything by which to judge.) There was a kind of magic, however tainted it became, in what this boy from blue-collar roots achieved with a microphone and before a crowd, and Luhrmann captures it as no other director, living or dead, likely could.

Gut Reaction: Overpowered - in a good way. It made me - at least for one night - an Elvis fan. (I couldn't help falling in love with this film. See what I did there?)

Memorable Moment: The first Vegas concert - Presley gives his all, while Parker plots. Grrrrrrrrrrr.

Ed's Verdict: 8.5/10. With the Aussie auteur's style cranked up high enough to blow a dozen amps, this telling of the King's story will alienate some, but it's unquestionably a dazzling achievement - with one hell of a star turn at its furiously pumping heart. Thank God and Baz that films this unique are still showing up in cinemas. 

TV Feature - Stranger Things

Don't deny until you try. (The following article spoils Stranger Things Seasons 1-4 like most people think pineapple spoils pizza.)

We've reached that stage. The one where anyone aware of Stranger Things who hasn't already watched it is either genuinely uninterested or holding back through sheer contrarian stubbornness - the kind of resistance reserved for epoch-defining shows like The Sopranos and The Wire and Breaking Bad. Not that Stranger Things bears relation to any of those weighty dramas, other than the likelihood that it too will be looked back on as a TV watershed moment, a milestone in home-viewing achievement, due to its blend of small-screen character drama and epic big-screen clout. But I'm not writing to convince the holdouts. Seriously, watch it or don't - you know your own preferences. I'm intrigued rather by what has made this show such compulsive viewing for those who do start watching, to the extent that when Season 4 Volume 2 landed last week, it temporarily broke Netflix.

The formula established by writing/directing team the Duffer Brothers in Season 1 of Stranger Things had a magic to it similar to that harnessed back in 2011 by J. J. Abrams with his film Super 8, only in the shape of long-form storytelling. Pit a group of plucky small-town American tweens against a supernatural entity, but set your story in the 1980s so that it's reminiscent of early Stephen King and Steven Spielberg. Spread the '80s references thick like peanut butter, thus locking in an older demographic along with today's teens. But remember to make the tale its own thing, so that you get people talking about the show's distinct mythology - of The Upside-Down and creatures labelled with names from Dungeons and Dragons and a psychic wunderkind known only as Eleven. Stranger Things's first outing did it to perfection, namely blending the warmly recognisable with the fresh and surprising, all courtesy of an ordinary town named Hawkins, Indiana.

Seasons 2 and 3 expanded this nostalgia-steeped mythology, drawing on a host of the era's cultural touchstones from the Cold War tensions of Schwarzenegger's Red Dawn to the teen comedies of John Hughes. They also threatened to overplay said formula with storytelling arcs that while full of enjoyable content felt very (some felt too) familiar. Then Season 4 shook everything up, viewers included, with continent-straddling ambition and a serious injection of Nightmare on Elm Street-style horror. The Duffer Brothers may have been away (thank you pandemic) for three years, but they and their extended cast returned with a bone-snapping vengeance. And Kate Bush.

That doesn't adequately capture it though. Youngsters on bikes, gleefully gruesome monster horror, neat plotting and superb visual storytelling enhanced with production values of which Mr Spielberg and team would be proud, plus a memorable soundtrack employed with enviable creative judgement - none of that cuts to what makes so many fall head-over-heels for this show. And that's the love with which its characters are drawn and developed. 

It struck me when Season 4, episode 3 helped me recover from the cinematic mess that was Jurassic World: Dominion. I felt more emotion during the scene where Jim Hopper was trying to extricate his broken ankle from its chain-gang manacle, frankly, than I had in two hours plus of IMAX dinosaur-dodging. And the simple reason was that I actually gave a damn about whether Hawkins' stumbling but innately heroic sheriff would escape that Russian gulag and get back to the people who loved him (specifically the woman who'd risk fiery aeronautical death to get to him, and the lost telekinetic girl who needed a Dad instead of a 'Papa'). Matt and Ross Duffer's imagination plus the conviction of actor David Harbour made me care about the big galoot - with his ever-deepening back story, and the layers of personality that become apparent beneath his initially buffoonish exterior. Now a leaner, more focused version of the grief-ridden sadsack he'd become, he's a key example of what the show can forge through multiple seasons' worth of logical, painstaking character development. 

Take the central group of bike-riding D&D-playing friends from Season 1. It would have been easy to retain the same bickering but devoted friendship dynamic throughout, but of course that's not how adolescence works. So we've had Mike and Lucas with their problem-strewn forays into romantic relationships, Dustin forging a bond with accidental babysitter Steve as he tries to negotiate the pitfalls of growing up, and post-traumatic Will hiding in childhood (the way he hung around in the den built for him by big brother Jonathan) as his friends mature beyond him. More than once the band threatens to break up, and it's always due more to life as we know it than to demodogs, mind flayers, or any of the other Lovecraftian horrors summoned up by the show's FX department. The reason viewers panic when any of our core characters are threatened, whether by sinister US government operatives, sadistic Soviet-era torturers, or big grisly creatures made of crunched-up people bits, is because we genuinely don't want to be robbed of their always charming company.

If there's one scene that sums up this devotion to character for me more than any other, it's that of Robin's coming-out in the latter part of 3. The situation, you will remember, has been set up with precision. Steve douche-to-hero Harrington has almost unconsciously fallen for the quirkily witty band-nerd throughout the season, until beaten up and bloodied and coming down from Russian truth serum he proclaims his feelings lying slumped in the restroom cubicle adjacent to hers. But the perfect two-shot shows Robin burying her head in her hands next door as the friendship she's unexpectedly come to cherish threatens to implode. So when Steve slides under the partition for a heart-to-heart, she levels with him regarding his misconception from their earlier conversation - it's not Steve she ever had a crush on, but rather the girl in class who was crushing on him. She tell it with dread, and we share her fear, that this revelation will lead to the kind of rejection, revulsion even, that we might have expected from Season 1 Steve. Having absorbed the unexpected news and his personal disappointment, however, he matter-of-factly reassures Robin that the girl who broke her heart wasn't all that, teasing her about it till soon they're laughing unrestrainedly together, friendship reaffirmed. 

We're happy for Robin that she's found a friend and confidant, and happier still that it's Steve, whose progress to emotional maturity and good dude-hood accelerates visibly during the conversation as he realises that friendship matters over all. It's a heartfelt, funny, and deeply touching moment (in a shopping mall toilet no less) that exemplifies Stranger Things' character-building craft. When two people have shared a moment that profound, how can you not care about them down the line when, say, a sentient vine in a parallel dimension attempts to throttle the life clean out of them?

Which brings us to season 4 and the current end-point of all things Stranger. The budget this time around reportedly averaged a staggering $30 million per episode, and it's all there on your home-viewing screen. The creatures, whether the demonic Vecna's prosthetics or the computer-generated detail of the demogorgons, are never less than impressive. The editing and sound design (consider the parallel basketball/D&D contests in episode 1) are exhilarating. The stunts, from laboratory massacres to helicopter crashes, are staged with nothing short of magnificence. Yet all of it is icing on a cake that's been baked expertly from the age-old ingredients of great story and great character. The nostalgia too is as much fun as ever it was (counting how many horror franchises are referenced is this season alone is a fun game), but even that just serves as the sprinkles on what makes the show truly terrific. 

So when Max is running up her own personal hill, it matters more because the Duffers and Sadie Sink have made her such an appealing human being. Likewise when Hopper takes on a demongorgon with a sword, or doomed metal guitarist Eddie Munson unleashes Metallica's Master of Puppets for an audience of peculiarly nasty vampire bats, or Steve, Robin and Nancy combine forces to take down Vecna. We're rooting for them all in extremis, because writers and performers have made them supremely watchable even when life is mundane. And when nemeses Eleven and One face off in a deciding 'mind fight', we're doubly invested because protagonist and antagonist alike have been written with depth and motivation, with the gifted likes of Millie Bobby Brown and Jamie Campbell Bower (more names, more talent?) cast in the roles. 

One criticism levelled against Matt and Ross Duffer is the unwillingness they display to trim the core group that has expanded each season, for the most part choosing instead to bump off single-season players when stakes require raising. The reason they give in interview is a solid one. They're not making Game of Thrones, they say; this show is pure uncontaminated escapism, however thrilling, so wiping out key players in a Hawkins-style Red Wedding would hardly suit the vibe. But I suspect an additional reason, for all the show-makers' screenwriting integrity. If you were to list the recurring good guys, who would you cull first? One of the original four junior high-schoolers? No - don't permanently break up the band. What about Jonathan? You couldn't do that to Will and Joyce. Murray? He's hilarious. Nancy? She's too bad-ass. Robin? The girl's just coming into her own. Steve? Steve??? No - please not Steve!!!

See? It's the result of making a show this darn entertaining with heroes this darn cheerable. Season 5's conclusion of may choose to break our hearts more than the end of Season 4 did - it's the climactic right-side-up versus upside-down stand-off, after all. Admit it - you're glad most of the familiar faces will still be there. That you'll get to hang out with the Stranger Things gang one last time.