Everything about Elvis Presley was big: his hair, his voice, his appetites, his sales figures, his concert crowds and, in later years, his waistband. The King sold over 300 million records during his career and more than twice that since a drug-induced heart failure finished him off at just 42 on August 16th, 1977. In fact, Presley’s untimely demise only cemented his status as chart-topping rock’n’roll deity. More than 40 years after his death, he remains huge. Yet strangely, none of the handful of scrappy biopics made about him have managed to even approach the monumental scale of his legend. Until now.
Australian auteur Baz Luhrmann’s maximalist take on Presley’s life story is every inch the grand opera of visual pyrotechnics, wedding-cake excess and archly anachronistic music we might expect from the director of Moulin Rouge! (2001) and The Great Gatsby (2013). But Elvis is more than just a razzle-dazzle retro-rock pageant. It also makes a generous case for the legendary rocker as a vulnerable, shy, tender-hearted soul with more impassioned liberal political leanings than his contested reputation might suggest. In the process, Luhrmann inevitably sanitises and romanticises Presley too much. But Elvis is still a commendably bold attempt to dramatise the singer’s epic rise and fall against the wider backdrop of late 20th century social history. World premiered out of competition in Cannes, this lavish love letter to rock’n’soul as liberating life force arrives in cinemas June. Early reviews have been mixed, but Elvis already feels like a pretty surefire summer crowd-pleaser.
Relative unknown Austin Butler stars as Presley, looking a little too clean-cut and boy-band in the early scenes, but fully inhabiting the role later. Luhrmann tracks the singer’s career over three acts, firstly as wildly gyrating, sexually incendiary proto-punk in the 1950s, his explosive shock impact on concert fans cleverly evoked here with distorted, sense-jarring audio effects. In the 1960s, be becomes a bland Hollywood entertainer married to Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge), his rebel-rock reputation eclipsed by the Beatles and their hippie peers. In the 1970s, he hits new highs and lows as a soulfully tragic, drug-damaged Vegas fixture. Luhrmann has jokingly called Elvis “the Apocalypse Now of musicals,”, though An American Trilogy may be a better fit.
Elvis plays across a huge canvas with a wide cast of characters, but it is essentially a two-hander, chronicling the increasingly turbulent relationship between Presley and his Machiavellian manager Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks). Buried behind extensive blubbery prosthetics, Hanks plays Parker on the edge of stilted caricature, but not wholly without empathy. A wily carnival showman who concealed his real background as an illegal Dutch immigrant, damaging Presley’s career in the process, the Colonel is undoubtedly the villain of this story. All the same, Hanks and Luhrmann allow him a puckish humour and a flicker of humanity, even in scenes where he shamelessly resorts to financial and emotional blackmail.
Part of Luhrmann’s mission with Elvis is to salvage Presley from his uber-kitsch caricature as an all-purpose symbol of catastrophic excess, corruption and cultural appropriation. Public Enemy’s ferocious 1989 rap anthem Fight The Power even called him a “straight up racist”. Luhrmann makes race central to his film, but heavily stresses the rock icon’s close ties and deep love for African-American music, drinking it in from a young age in Memphis gospel churches and blues joints. We see his warm friendship with black artists like BB King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), his inspirational exposure to groundbreaking R&B performers like Little Richard (Alton Mason) and Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola Quartey), his anguish over Martin Luther King’s assassination, and so on.
In a bold musical flourish, Luhrmann brings this connection up to date by including hip-hop treatments of classic Presley songs on the film’s starry soundtrack, with rappers such as Doja Cat and Denzel Curry appearing alongside Kasey Musgraves, Jack White, Stevie Nicks and more. This revisionist remix approach is sure to incite heated critical debate, but Luhrmann is not alone in pushing Presley’s progressive credentials. Even Public Enemy’s Chuck D later softened his charge of racism. “I detested the iconic building up of Elvis because it pretty much obscured every element of black creation all around him,” the heavyweight rap star told me some years ago. “But as a talent, he was unquestionably brilliant.”
The danger of trying to cram such a huge life into a single film is that Elvis risks becoming a simplistic box-ticking exercise, with scant room for emotional shading or character depth. While Presley’s beloved mother Gladys (Helen Thomson) and father Vernon (Luhrmann regular Richard Roxborough) make their presence felt, too many secondary players are mere sketches. Elvis would have benefited from a little more conversation, and a little less action.
Luhrmann’s signature camp, ironic wit is also in short supply here, with too many on-the-nose lines that play like soapy melodrama: “I killed my mother and since then I’ve been lost”,”Lisa is your daughter, she needs a father!”, and so on. An endless parade of stuffed-shirt authority figures who oppose Presley because they fear his Dionysian, sexually dangerous, race-mixing anarchy also becomes wearily didactic after a while. We get it, Baz, message received.
In fairness, Luhrmann hits a richer emotional seam in the film’s latter half, when Presley finally begins to assert himself in a doomed power struggle to shake free of Parker and reclaim his soul. Key events from these final years, notably the singer’s career-reviving 1968 Comeback Special on NBC television and marathon Las Vegas residency, are superbly staged set-piece sequences. Elvis even fabricates an audacious confrontation in which Presley tries to fire Parker mid-show. This never happened, but it probably should have done.
His face puffed out by prosthetics, Butler looks increasingly, uncannily like The King in these later scenes, their voices blending in the audio mix on mighty versions of Suspicious Minds, Unchained Melody, In The Ghetto and more. A final extended montage brings footage of the real Presley into the film, lending extra poignancy to his looming demise. His notoriously sordid, undignified death itself is tastefully handled here, off screen.
Filmed in Australia, Elvis never looks less than fantastic. Luhrmann and his team deliver extravagantly dynamic camerawork, sun-saturated colours, archly retro digital graphics, bravura jump cuts that dance between different time periods, and multi-screen mosaic effects that pay winking homage to Denis Sanders’ Vegas concert film Elvis: That’s The Way It Is (1970). Maximum credit is also due to the director’s long-time collaborator (and wife) Catherine Martin for her kaleidoscopic costumes and opulent period production design. Even if Presley is probably too big and complex a figure to squeeze into a single definitive film, this unashamedly subjective, big-hearted epic takes a pretty impressive swing at it. Elvis has left the building, but Luhrmann’s truth is marching on.
Cast: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh, Olivia DeJonge, Luke Bracey, Natasha Bassett, David Wenham, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Xavier Samuel, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Dacre Montgomery, Leon Ford, Kate Mulvany, Gareth Davies, Charles Grounds, Josh McConville, Adam Dunn, Yola, Alton Mason, Gary Clark Jr., Shonka Dukureh, Chaydon Jay
Director: Baz Luhrmann
Screenwriters: Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner; story by Luhrmann and Doner
Producers: Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin, Gail Berman, Patrick McCormick, Schuyler Weiss
Cinematography: Mandy Walker
Editing: Matt Villa, Jonathan Redmond
Production designers: Catherine Martin, Karen Murphy
Costume designer: Catherine Martin
Music: Elliott Wheeler
Production companies: Bazmark (Australia), The Jackal Group (US)
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition)
In English
159 minutes
