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.