Formula: Walk the Line * The Great Gatsby
Biopics are hard. Music ones in particular. It turns out, famous musicians go through a lot of the same beats in their lives. There’s a rise from obscurity to prominence. The prominence leads to controversy. Attempting to overcome the controversy leads to decadence or overindulgence; typically drugs. In the happy stories, they come out on the other side of it stronger. In the sad ones, it causes their demise. Since the biopic reached the point of parody in films like Walk Hard, I’ve noticed three directions the movies have gone. Some power through the predictability and hope the strength of the performances carry them through. The result of that has ranged anywhere from I Saw the Light to Bohemian Rhapsody, with more of them closer to the former than the latter. The second method has been the limited biopic. Don’t do the whole life. Narrow it down, like a Miles Ahead or Love & Mercy. Those tend to hit with critics but struggle with audiences. Finally there’s the mood piece. That’s when the movie isn’t so much the life story as it is the feeling of the life story. I believe that’s the approach of I’m Not There and sort of Rocketman. These movies can be great, but they can struggle to work on their own. It’s hard to appreciate the choices they are making in the movie without already being familiar with the story.
Being a Baz Lurhman film, it should come as no surprise that Elvis is that final category of biopic. It is literally the fever dream of Elvis’ (Austin Butler) dying manager Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks). There is not a stylistic flourish the movie doesn’t like or a set that went undressed. To be fair, this fits with the man the film is about. Part of the reason it’s taken so long for a proper Elvis biopic to get made is because he’s such a large figure that the film needed a director who wouldn’t balk at the size and opulence of the story.
This film begins with Colonel Tom Parker in 1990s Las Vegas suffering a heart attack. As he phases in and out of reality, he begins a narration that sounds like an argument in his defense that he’s been going over in his head for decades. According to him, he made Elvis and here’s why. That begins the story of Elvis from childhood to his death, often told through montage and interpretations of moment. What’s most key is that while Parker is narrating the film, the film is not his perspective alone. Often, especially later, what Parker is saying conflicts with what we are seeing on screen. It increasingly becomes about where his and Elvis’ stories diverge which creates a fun tension throughout the movie.
The most important thing about the movie is that Austin Butler is very good as Elvis Pressley. Look, Elvis is a hard role to play because there are certain personas and personalities so unique that any attempt to play them accurately feels like caricature. I often like to point to Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing Phillippe Petit in The Walk. It’s an objectively silly performance, but listen to the real Phillippe Petit. What was Gordon-Levitt supposed to do? Or look more recently to Julia Garner in Inventing Anna. That Butler gets me to forget that it’s an actor trying to “do Elvis” is a massive accomplishment. He finds humanity in the character in a way I didn’t expect. The cast around him is a little less impressive. Tom Hanks does what he can with an equally large yet less imitated role. And it’s a Dutch man who is trying not to be Dutch. Layer that under a fat suit and what was Hanks supposed to do? Yes, the answer is probably instead to get a Stellan Skarsgaard (who is already used to morphing his Swedish accent) to put on a few pounds and have a go at it, but I get the desire to cast Hanks if Hanks wants the role. No one else in the cast makes a huge impression. Olivia DeJonge is good in small stints as Priscilla Pressley. Kelvin Harrison Jr. pops in a few scenes as B.B. King. Really though, there’s little room for anything other than Lurhman’s direction, Butler’s performance, and Hanks’ narration.
I wish I was a little more familiar with the beats of Elvis Pressley’s actual story. There’s a lot in this film where I felt I was getting pitched something in a specific way or would’ve liked to know the non-stylized version first. This didn’t ruin the film or anything. Rather, it was just that it’s a movie that made me very aware of how I could be enjoying it more; like watching a football movie when I don’t know how to play football and they never explain the rules in the movie.
There are some aspects of Elvis’ story the film glosses over. The two that jump out to me are Priscilla and his musical influences. Priscilla’s age when they got together the film just completely ignores. I do get it. It’s hard to point out that she was 14 and he was 24 without that stopping the whole movie, but it is telling. The film tries to do a better job at explaining how his popularity came from him being white and adopting black music. I do believe as the movie does that his reasons for it were innocent enough – he was poor, grew up in a black community, and fell in love with the music. Again though, that’s something that could derail the entire movie, so they only get into it so much. They make a good faith effort but it still doesn’t feel like enough. It’s hard to cover everything in a life as big and public as Elvis’. The movie is already 2h39m and feels edited down. In another world, Baz Lurhman would’ve used his Netflix budget for The Get Down to make a 6-part Elvis limited series instead. Honestly, the film flows pretty well. While it felt long, it didn’t feel as long as it actually was. That’s not nothing.
It’s hard to know what to say about a movie that’s meant to be this extravagant. It’s too much. The movie is a sensory overload and has too much story for a limited amount of time. That overload is intentional though. Austin Butler rises to the occasion and never gets swallowed up by what Lurhman is doing. I liked it.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
