Baz Luhrmann (2022)
Although I was soon hoping we’d walk out, I decided that, if we stayed with Elvis to the end, I wouldn’t waste any more of my life writing about it. With an hour still to go (the whole thing runs 159 minutes), Sally had had enough and we made for the exit – which leaves a bit of time to spare for this note.
I’d seen the trailer for the film a few days ago. Ten minutes into the real thing, I felt I was still watching a trailer. That feeling didn’t really change. Elvis is all highlights – highlights, that is, in the sense of emphases, not moments of outstanding quality. It begins with a montage of short sequences, increasingly frenetic. When these reach breaking point, Baz Luhrmann cuts to Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s notorious manager, in old age, waking up in alarm in a hospital bed. It seems the crazy prologue may have been Parker’s nightmare but after this short pause for breath the whirligig resumes until its next nervous breakdown, and that’s how the film goes on (and on). Colonel Parker (Tom Hanks) is the voiceover narrator so perhaps all we see is the product of his nasty mind – perhaps Parker’s to blame not just for what went wrong in the life of Elvis Presley (Austin Butler) but also for what’s wrong with Luhrmann’s film of the life. The non-stop hyperbole ensures that nothing stands out as particularly important. You don’t, for example, get any sense of moral hysteria feeding the brouhaha around Elvis’s early TV appearances – the claims he was corrupting the youth of America – because this episode is no more manic than anything that’s gone before.
As Elvis, Austin Butler does his own singing and, to these non-expert ears, does it very well. Although he’s also the right height, he looks longer and thinner than Presley ever did, even in his slimline youth. When Butler speaks he expresses little more than a determination to keep up the vocal mimicry he’s clearly worked hard on. There are occasional shots in which his facial resemblance to the real thing is very close: Luhrmann and his cinematographer, Mandy Walker, tend to hold these shots for as long as possible – they almost turn into still photographs. This gets in the way of any attempt at characterisation: once the camera moves on, Austin Butler reverts to looking his usual self rather than like Elvis’s double. His willowy appearance and wholly unintimidating presence turn him into a pale imitation of the King. Still, Butler comes off a lot better than Tom Hanks, who’s absurd as the villain of the piece. This isn’t because Hanks can only play nice guys (the title character in Captain Phillips (2013), one of his finest performances, may be a hero but he isn’t nice). It’s because this is villainy courtesy of a fat suit, a false nose and a phony (shaky) foreign accent. (Parker was born and grew up in the Netherlands.) The result is cruder than a guest-star baddie turn in a Batman – you don’t for a moment take Parker seriously.
The governing principle – make everything exciting – is bound to be counterproductive. The film is one eyecatcher after another, utterly soulless and unenlightening about its subject, either as a person or a myth. This isn’t the first Baz Luhrmann extravaganza to present with an acute case of ADHD but Elvis makes Moulin Rouge! (2001) look relatively sedate. Even though I’ve never been a great Presley fan, I was frustrated that, whenever Austin Butler started a song, Luhrmann quickly tired of it and cut to something else. (He does the same to, among others, Shonka Dukureh as Big Mama Thornton and Cle Morgan as Mahalia Jackson.) It’s ironic that we eventually parted company with the film during a sequence that, in the first ninety minutes at least, is uniquely extended – in fact, tiresomely protracted.
In 1968, Parker arranges for Elvis to star in a traditional Christmas TV special – wearing a jolly patterned red sweater, singing Yuletide schmaltz, and so on. Elvis has other ideas: he goes on stage in leathers and performs the numbers that originally made his name. One after another: we instantly get the point that Luhrmann makes repeatedly. It’s mildly amusing that, this being a Christmas show, the recording takes place in June. It isn’t funny that a TV set is showing news film of the shooting of Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles. Elvis is supposedly deeply moved by this (as he has also supposedly been by the recent assassination of Martin Luther King) and Luhrmann is certainly transfixed by the image of the stricken Kennedy. This tasteless intrusion of tragic reality into a film that glories in artificiality at least put an end to the stupefying experience of watching Elvis. It brought us to our feet and we left the building.
29 June 2022
