Elvis movie by director Baz Luhrmann: review — it’s big and bold and brash but is it any good
It’s big. It’s bold. It’s brash. Elvis is back via Baz Luhrman’s new $200m film epic on The King. But is it any good? Read the first review.
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Elvis (M)
Director: Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!)
Starring: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks
Rating : **
It’s big. It’s bold. It’s brash. It’s brassy. And yet, it’s nothin’ but a blue-suede snooze.
Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has re-entered the building.
However, you will have trouble finding him inside the crazily cluttered, garishly decorated multi-room mansion of a movie which bears his name.
The architect of this flamboyantly discombobulated biopic is that famously flashy Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrmann.
As everyone knows from Luhrmann’s past big-screen glitter bombs such as Moulin Rouge! and The Great Gatsby, a straight-down-the-line, sticking-to-the-facts biopic of Elvis Presley was never, ever going to be an option here.
However, no-one could possibly have envisaged just how wide of its supposed target this 200 million-buck blockbuster is often aiming.
The short life, wild times and tragic demise of the once and future King of Rock’n’Roll are all stuffed into a storytelling pinata. So too are big burlesque clumps of that bonkers Bazzamatazz we’ve been dazzled and frazzled by before.
Luhrmann keeps whacking away at the thing for over two-and-a-half hours until it is just about empty … and the audience is simply exhausted.
As for Elvis Presley himself, well, he disappears back inside his legend as the greatest one-man pop-cultural phenomenon there was, or ever will be.
Meanwhile, those who stick around until the end of the show will know no more or less of the man than they did before.
The woozy, out-of-focus shimmer in which Elvis spends much of the movie is caused by a screenplay which lists a meagre handful of significant events and well-known traits, and simply underlines them repeatedly.
First of all, we get a front-row seat as the atomic talent of Memphis-born poor boy Elvis Presley (played adeptly enough by relative unknown Austin Butler) is detonated smack-bang in the middle of a docile 1950s.
A predatory carny named Col. Tom Parker (a bizarre Tom Hanks in a big fat-suit, who also narrates the entire movie in a bad Dutch accent) sees all the dollar signs ahead, and becomes the manipulative manager of the global sensation.
As is the case with many of the performance sequences, the movie does an admittedly brilliant job of capturing what a seismic experience it must have been to be rumbled by the hip-wiggling, pants-jiggling sex-quake of the young Elvis.
The death of Presley’s beloved ma Gladys, his stint in Germany as a US soldier, and the seedy seduction of his teenage future wife Priscilla are given the blink-miss treatment.
Many of the singer’s biggest hits are similarly shredded down to quick audio clips (or, even worse, covered by someone else entirely).
As for Elvis’ legendary entourage the Memphis Mafia, they faintly register, if at all. You want a guided tour of Graceland, at once Elvis’ spiritual temple, adventure playground and personal prison? Again, you hardly get a hint of what the joint meant to Presley.
Suddenly, it is the late 1960s, and Elvis is a shell of his former self, an uncool Hollywood hack doing two goofy movies a year for a fanbase losing members daily to the groovy likes of The Beatles, the Stones and Bob Dylan.
Then, in a moment of inspiration, Elvis decides to go against the conservative playbook of shonky ol’ Colonel Tom, and embraces a radical change of both sound and image. The end result is the triumphant 1968 TV broadcast known as The NBC Comeback Special.
Finally, the movie slows down and proceeds relatively respectfully towards Elvis’ final years in the 1970s, as too many Vegas shows and a destructive dependency on drugs hand him a one-way ticket to an early death at the age of just 42.
As miserable as it is to be a party to a jowly, jump-suited Elvis, firing handguns into TV sets in his Vegas rooftop penthouse, it is only here that the movie finally forges any semblance of an emotional connection with the viewer.
The payoff is the production’s one truly moving and memorable scene: a spine-tingling re-enactment of Elvis’ final live performance, just weeks before his passing.
An utterly haunting rendition of the standard Unchained Melody – with the King accompanying himself, playing a rolling piano arrangement that sounds like the start of a death spiral – goes to an all too lonely, all too desolate, all too human place that the real Elvis Presley must have known all too well.
If only the movie bearing his name could have made the effort to try and find him there.
Elvis opens in cinemas nationwide on Thursday June 23rd.
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Originally published as Elvis movie by director Baz Luhrmann: review — it’s big and bold and brash but is it any good
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