FLASHBACK: So…I literally JUST saw Elvis. Like, today. To give a quick review:
Elvis (2022) is the once in a lifetime biopic that works for more than just fanservice. In the wake of the Elvis Presley decline in relevance, Luhrmann has been able to draw out the tragedy of the King of Rock and Roll, emphasise the blackness of the genre, and turn Austin Butler into more than Ashley Tisdale’s former co-star. It is a film about Elvis the Legend, and not the man, which works in context of the framing device that covers the whole story. This is an epic story, told in broad strokes, which favours the hectic edits and motifs of reflections and repeating images. Elvis, even within the story, is little more than an idea. It’s Luhrmann at his most coherent and pop culture in its purest form.
I wrote that review the day I saw Elvis, because I had a sudden vision of an article listing pop culture and historical figures and moments that I think Baz Luhrmann would handle well, in the wake of his sudden skills in real life adaptation.
For the record, the ones I considered were:
- Kurt Cobain
- Dennis Rodman and Carmen Electra
- Edward II of England
- Diana Ross
- Judy Garland
- William Taylor Desmond
- Mariah Carey
Ignoring the fact that adaptation was a skill that has always been in his arsenal, it’s also an incredibly loose telling of the Elvis story. I don’t think many of the options I had listed in this half-finished draft would have made for great or even plausible Luhrmann films. That simply isn’t how he exists.
I think there is a perception of the director as the film equivalent of Ryan Murphy. In many ways, they are remarkably similar creators. Genre obsessed auteurs who have adapted their personal styles and interests to mass market appeal. Aesthetic styles that have at once distinguished them from their peers and led to extreme amounts of mimicry. But there’s two fundamental differences in their professional tastes. The first is that Murphy loves to work, regardless of the quality of his output. There is a reason why his work has suffered a significant decline in quality in the past decade. But the other reason, and one I don’t see brought up often, is that Luhrmann has always been sincere in his creations.
That sounds like a burn on Murphy, but it’s more a burn on filmmaking.
Irony has poisoned so many films in the past decade, it’s insane. Knowing looks to the camera, a DreamWorks eyebrow at purposefully corny dialogue, it’s all just swamped heart and story in cheap gags. Take Spiderman: No Way Home (2021), which is filled with moments built around emotional climax, but cheapened by a script that desperately wants you to giggle at its lazy jokes. This weird need to continually remind you that you’re watching a movie, that you’re the audience, cheapens the movie-going experience. You cannot be immersed in something so shallow it’s dry and flat.
That’s part of the reason why the Murphy comparison doesn’t work for me. He is irony personified. Glee would jokes regularly about how the audience has reacted or would react. He’s built an entire second career retelling pop culture moments in a series format, regardless of if it fits. He wants you to be aware and comparing his work to real life, because that is where the meat is. It works best when the reality is too far to really know (hello Feud!) but struggles when we have actual access to the often better written reality (something popped into your head, didn’t it?).
Elvis comes dangerous close to this, but lacks the historic specificity of Murphy’s work.
To come clean, Elvis Presley is not a man I admire. Something about his obsession for girls and not women doesn’t sit right with me…I’m forgetting the word for that. But also, as a pop culture figure, everyone seems to have become inclined to leave him to rot. I’m not sure when this culture shift happened, but I’m guessing it’s probably to do with the new Las Vegas.
Since Vegas got taken out of the mob’s hands, everything has shifted. For years, it was the city of gambling, sex work, and has-been pop stars. Yes, you love Cher and Celine Dion, but neither are likely viable hitmakers anymore. But with the (in hindsight regrettable) Britney Spears residency, every pop star over 30 with no other big offers has had a stint. Christina Aguilera, Usher, Katy Perry, John Legend, the Jonas Brothers, Avril Lavigne, Lady Gaga, the list goes on. It’s an easy gig, particularly for those with young families. You go out, do your set, maybe an extra hour for a meet and greet, then go home.
The darkness to this is obvious. You’re not dead or unable to have hit songs as you approach middle age. Our best pop artists of the past half century have maintained careers for decades in the traditional mainstream before moving on to these easier gigs. Some never have. But when you look at the career of Presley, the twitter stan adage “rot in Vegas” is the reality. And Luhrmann’s film takes that and runs with it. It’s a tragedy of epic proportions, about a man who had all the opportunities in the world, and none of drive to see them through.
The film starts, after an opening monologue by the Colonel Tom Parker, with him walking up to the silhouette of a young Presley. And that’s a continued theme throughout. The pop star is watched at every moment, by people who want to consume him, whether it be sexually or monetarily. His image is repeated, whether it be in the mirrors of the fun maze, or the monitors of his Christmas special. So, when his mother dies, and his manager offers to take over that caregiver role for him, it’s the beginning of a spider web story. Tom Hanks has been watching him at all moments, with knowing stares. Luhrmann plays on this throughout his staging of their relationship.
In fact, this is a film from, partially, the perspective and opinion of the Colonel. It’s quite clear that you shouldn’t trust his narration. We won’t bully Tom Hanks for the accent, but I just wanted to note that it is ridiculous. From his hazy introduction, to the way his eyes are deadened with lighting that often leaves them in shadow, he’s shown to be a malignant force. There’s always a twinkle in his eye when he convinces his prey, but it is brief and a sign of his carnival barker ways. He’s a parasitic force on everyone who trusts him, making his role as the tone setter an incredibly interesting choice. It works to make nothing feel firm
Austin Butler has (rightfully) received an immense amount of praise and early awards buzz for his performance. Within a script this broad, it would have been easy to play Presley as a caricature. The Elvis of Vegas strips and drag king performances is one of poses and hip thrusts. But Butler takes the role and makes him, for lack of a better term, incredibly weak. He freezes up the moment he walks on stage, crumples at the loss of his mother, stumbles in a drug induced haze. Throughout the film, his flashes of personal bravery are often paired with an ultimate acquiescence to the Colonel. Their uncomfortable, abusive, and faux-incestuous relationship causes him to give up his dreams time and time again.
To pull back, this makes the movie sound depressing. It really isn’t. Luhrmann is a filmmaker with a penchant for the melodramatic, not the solemn, so the majority of the film is hopeful. Sometimes, this means passing over the more unsavoury parts of the Elvis legacy easy breezy Covergirl (Priscilla is simply referred as a teenager, and not explicitly aged until she’s close to 30), but most of its hope is just built into the filmmaking. The colours aren’t bright, they’re rich. The lighting isn’t just glamorous, it’s often so soft and enveloping that the shots look painterly.
When I wrote back in March about the issues I had with Euphoria, one of the things I flagged was how lighting for film is significantly more difficult than digital. Framing is also important, and clearly this was a point of importance for the entirety of the cast and crew. Cinematography Mandy Walker spoke to Filmmaker Magazine about how she and the crew worked to bring each moment in the film to life, from the immensity of the Vegas stage to the intimacy of the Louisiana Hayride. Where Euphoria often struggled to maintain control of a visual style that was clearly new to Levinson, Luhrmann and his crew were able to not just meet the challenge of using a product much less common in modern cinema (although returning in popularity) but use it for specific effect. One of the best stories Walker tells is of finding ways to ensure eyelight for Butler as Elvis, to emphasis his charisma.
The film mostly lacks the aesthetic overload of Luhrmann’s worst products. He’s sparing in using gaudy filmmaking to communicate to the audience, tending to let actions on screen take precedent. When that jump is made, it’s incredibly effective. While the opening chaos that surrounds the entrance of the Colonel is likely to stick the most with people, it is not my favourite touch. Instead, I return to Hollywood montage, where the shifting in and out of focus leads to multiple Elvises to fill the screen like a kaleidoscope. It’s yet another moment of repeating portraits of the man at the centre of it all.
To move away from Presley, the other characters in the film outside of Tom Parker mostly exist as props. His family reacts to his fame, his managers uselessly fume at his inaction, and Priscilla…we’ll get to Priscilla. The best of the side characters are the Black musicians who fill the musical influences of his life, from the performers in the church who encourage his holy ecstasy, to B.B. King, who gives him a pep talk on the balcony. Whether these moments are historically accurate is another story (some surprisingly are), but they do establish the Blackness of music that makes up this soundtrack.
I didn’t expect any sort of racial angle to a film about a white musician made by a white Australian man, but Luhrmann seems to have determined it essential to the story. And with that…it really says very little. Or rather, what it does say is confusing. On one hand, Presley is explicitly tied to Black music. He is most comfortable in his scenes with Black performers, most excited by Black genres. When he turns to what music rests in his soul, it’s Black, American sounds. And he is, within the world of the film, racialized as black for his music and performance style. He is presented as a force that undermines the status quo, which is racist and violent. But Elvis Presley wasn’t Black, and the privilege of his whiteness is also acknowledged.
“There’s more sides to the story, I’ma tell everybody” snips Doja Cat in the tie-in song, as Presley walks through a Black neighbourhood to make music that, in theory, will fund Black artists. While the song is clearly playing the line between the film’s story and a generic break up record, there’s moments that feel like a condemnation of the subject that may be Elvis. Over Big Mama Thorton’s compelling vocals, she calls the subject a fraud, a player, not “the man”. It isn’t his song, just a cover. Within the context of the film, it feels like a pointed attempt to highlight that Elvis is not who he is perceived to be by the public. Hound Dog is Thorton’s first, a Black artist’s first, as is almost every other song in the film. B.B. King’s entire speech to him boils down to demanding he make use of his privilege to perform.
But ultimately, the film isn’t about Elvis covering the music of Black artists. It’s a tragedy about a man who is exploited and dies too young. The ones who suffer for him aren’t his influences, it’s his family. His mother, hinted at being an alcoholic, dies while he’s in Germany from grief. His father gives up his independence and morals to allow his son to become a star. Priscilla gives up on their marriage and takes their daughter away.
Yes, back to Priscilla Presley. The film doesn’t want you to consider their age gap, which only comes up when they’re both too old to notice it’s bad. Instead, she’s just a generic wife figure. Luhrmann makes the right call here, because any further insight into the family Presley mistreats, he loses his likability. He needs to be the victim for the story to work. It’s not tragic when an asshole dies. She’s a cipher to the audience, the woman he lost because of his addiction. But she isn’t a character in her own right.
Luhrmann’s filmography is filled with the woes of expectation, and the disappointment that comes from weak but powerful men. Even his Romeo’s great flaw isn’t love, it’s an inability to live in his grief. Returning to the list I put forward initially of figures I’d want him to tackle, nearly half were women, and I don’t think that’s in his wheelhouse. He’s a man obsessed with men, men who lose it all. Masculine sacrifice and malfunction fill these films. The women mostly fade away. This isn’t to say he is a misogynistic filmmaker, but rather one with a specific point of view. If he doesn’t have a story to tell about a woman, I’d rather he not try to.
Elvis (2022) is a film that works in broad strokes, as an Epic, capitalised for a reason. It’s the story of pop culture, the film to end all films about the dead celebrity. Elvis is every Norman Maine, a washed-up star who dies as he’s fading away, rather than before. We tell stories of women who die at their peak, and men who die after that. There is a reason Hollywood will never give us a romantic look at James Dean’s final days, but a million exploitative Marilyn Monroe films. Part of it is that men are slower to lose value, but part of it is we care about their failed promise. In these stories, a man is tragic because he outlived his potential and thus lived to see himself fail. It’s culturally painful to see a man past his prime, as it is painful to see a woman die during hers.
The film is good. I’ll say that much about it. Luhrmann is a compelling filmmaker, who grasps the story he’s telling. There’s little attempt at nuance, and what is there is more to distract from his own failure to make a statement on the ethicacy of Presley’s legacy as it pertains to the more unsavoury aspects. It works because it’s broad and easy. It’s a big Hollywood blockbuster that feels incredibly nostalgic, both in subject and style. In that way, it’s the film we’ve needed for a while.
I’m sure you can say the same thing about Top Gun, but I haven’t and won’t see it.
A Baz Luhrmann Mariah Carey biopic sounds great after watching Elvis. She does want her biopic to be "spectacular and real", which I think Luhrmann can do. You did make me reconsider with how much better he is with male main characters. Since her story is so long, her idea for an eight-part series might be better. Let's hope Lee Daniels does her justice. Also, I wouldn't be shocked if Austin won an Oscar, and the movie won an Oscar for film editing.