Film Review: Elvis
With an electric Austin Butler, Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is biopic formula as maximalist odyssey
Detonating its staid biopic formula with supernova movie star Austin Butler and lunatic, maximalist filmmaking, Baz Luhrmann — with maniacal glee — paints an irresistible portrait of a tortured artist. You won’t learn anything from Elvis you can’t glean from the skim of a Wikipedia page, but its boilerplate, breakneck procession is upended by hair-raising voltage and an astonishing capture of The King’s mythic charisma. Minor spoilers ahead…
Louisiana Hayride, 1954. The first time we lay eyes on him in Baz Luhrmann’s extravagant biopic, 19-year-old Elvis Presley (Austin Butler) is a skinny bundle of nerves, guitar shaking in hand and his trepidation swallowed whole by a pink satin suit. “Get a haircut, fairy,” the audience heckles. Presley hesitates, but then he comes alive, struck by a lightning bolt of charisma that can only be described as divine, belting out the lines of what would become his first major hit, “Baby Let’s Play House.” As his steely, grab-you-by-the-ears baritone rips through the crowd, igniting libidos and fevered screams, director of photography Mandy Walker frames the future king of rock and roll with cuts of slow motion and closeups. “Them girls wanna see you wiggle,” Presley’s bandmates counsel. Thrusts and gyrations send the pink fabric of his once oversized getup rippling - now a full-on regalia - as Luhrmann overlays the non-diegetic screech of an electric guitar over the performance. Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) - Elvis’ utterly over-the-top Salieri - narrates with an unplaceable European drawl: “In that moment, I saw that skinny boy transform into a superhero.”
If Elvis is a vehicle barreling through its subject’s high-flying biography, then Austin Butler is its unstoppable engine. A rarefied type of performance, Butler’s Elvis Presley is all sweat and swagger in a way that transcends imitation into pure evocation, matching Luhrmann’s sensationalist rollercoaster with an oozing sex appeal. It’s one thing to show us The King’s ability to whip his crowds into panty-dropping hysterics, it’s another thing entirely to make us believe it. But even beyond the magnetism of his stage presence, Butler fully captures Elvis’ naïveté, vulnerability, and seductiveness; it’s a resurrection of an icon that once rocked all of America.
“…[Butler] is all sweat and swagger in a way that transcends imitation into pure evocation, matching Luhrmann’s sensationalist rollercoaster with an oozing sex appeal.”
As a biopic, Elvis is fairly unremarkable, hitting a relentless, crowded cascade of bullet points you would easily find on a Wikipedia page. And with Tom Hanks’ dastardly performance (he might as well have hooves for feet, toting a pitchfork) as Tom Parker, Presley’s reprobate manager all but accused of sending the superstar to an early grave, the narrative tips its scales towards hagiography. Elvis details in broad strokes the Black influences upon Presley’s music - from his early surroundings of Southern gospel and the later support from artists such as B. B. King, Big Mama Thornton, and Little Richard - but Luhrmann rarely has the narrative wherewithal to explore the thornier side of things. The film dabbles with truths, that Elvis defied racists and was a friend of the Civil Rights Movement, but largely leaves his complex legacy that straddled the line between reverence and exploitation of Black culture uninterrogated. The same thing goes for Presley’s relationship with Priscilla Ann Wagner (Olivia DeJonge), painted as a whirlwind romance that hits every familiar beat of its Walk Hard tragedy: drugs, infidelity, and ennui as the price of soaring fame. Left out of the picture? An eyebrow-raising age gap (when they first met he was 24, she was 14) and decades of alleged abuse.
With its sanitized perspective, Elvis is mostly uninterested in deconstructing Presley the man; instead, Luhrmann strives to convey a legend made flesh and blood. Laden in prosthetics, a fat suit, and a ludicrous accent, much can be said about Tom Hanks’ Christmas ham of a turn - it’s either so bad it’s good, or so bad it’s just plain bad - but it’s a fascinating and smart lens to view Elvis: a powerful remove that mythologizes every shimmy, every beat, every barn burner performance. It also helps that Luhrmann’s lascivious showmanship seeps into every frame; all leading branches to go small shorn in favor of the big, big, big. From its opening moments of an ornate, filigreed shutter blooming into its first shot, Elvis is uncontainable: boisterous montages, frenzied cross-cutting, animated interludes, it’s all a blazing assault on the senses. Your mileage may vary when it comes to Luhrmann’s near-lunatic maximalism - Elvis is essentially a feature-length movie trailer - but you would be hard-pressed to find a better marriage between a film’s energy and its lead performance: Austin Butler, almost feral with his presence, is a perfect fit for this bombastic odyssey. He kills it.
“With its sanitized lens, Elvis is mostly uninterested in deconstructing Presley the man; instead, Luhrmann strives to convey a myth made flesh and blood.”
Elvis, even with its unyielding barrage, knows how to work the simple pleasures of its jukebox musical: A searing, rebellious rendition of “Trouble” takes place as conservative puritans set their sights on Presley and his sex appeal, and haunting variations of hits such as “Fools Rush In” flit in and out of the periphery. Baz, ever the impish impresario, even includes anachronisms in his energetic montages to dizzying effect. Doja Cat, Denzel Curry, and even a Britney Spears “Toxic” needle drop make appearances, but it’s not as head-scratching as you would think nor is it played for laughs: Elvis makes its point that The King was everywhere and is eternal, his rock and roll tendrils reaching all the way to the artists of now.
At 159 minutes long as a Baz Luhrmann flick, it’s inevitable that Elvis runs out of gas. The film’s final act, which details Presley’s gilded-cage residency in Vegas and the tragic spiral to his ignoble end, loses much of the dazzling luster that came before. With its superstar hooked on pills and all but imprisoned by Parker’s greedy machinations, Elvis runs through the boilerplate biopic downfall, unwisely shifting its focus to its Colonel Parker frame story. But even then, we close on a corker of a finale, as Butler sweats through jowly prosthetics to belt out “Unchained Melody” one final time to bring the entire house down. A strained - but still radiant - voice melds with archival footage of The King’s last performance, and hammers home that this was no impersonation, but a conjuration. Elvis is a perplexing contradiction, equal parts breathtaking and exhausting, but the spectacle - and Austin Butler’s star-making evocation of the king of rock and roll - is undeniable.
