Elvis Review

This weekend saw the release of eccentric Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, a biopic epic about the troubled life of the king of rock n’ roll. Oh boy, this is a whole lot of movie. Luhrmann and company have stuffed an almost overwhelming amount of sequins and style into every frame of this film, and in doing so have managed to turn their retelling of this well-known story into something truly unexpected. Exceptionally unexpected. Everytime you think you know what’s coming, Elvis throws you an absolute curveball and does something super weird instead. Somehow, the filmmakers managed to top A24’s Everything Everywhere All At Once, by making the Elvis Presley biopic the strangest movie of the year. It’s as though every time Baz Luhmann had to make a decision regarding the production of this film, he thought to himself “What’s the weirdest choice I could make here?” and then just put that in the movie. 

Elvis is so strange, in fact, that I’ve been struggling to write a conventional review for it. Where do you start with a movie that made a million insane choices? I have decided instead to list all the questions left buzzing through my head after leaving the screening. This list is in no way comprehensive. I’m sure there are bewildering aspects of this film that I left out, and for that I sincerely apologize. Perhaps I will return to this topic again in a future article. I can definitely see a world where, two weeks from now, I’ll wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, haunted by yet another unhinged Baz Luhrmann creative decision I forgot, and frantically type out a follow-up article. Until then, this is simply a list of the questions I had walking out of the theater.

Last thing before I get into it: it should be noted that while I’m really hammering home how unfathomably strange this movie is, that does not mean I hated it. All things considered, I was actually kinda into it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have questions. Let’s begin.

1: What the hell is Tom Hanks doing in this movie?

Hanks plays Elvis’ manager “Colonel” Tom Parker, an older, very heavy, balding man with a thick Dutch accent. Through the aid of mountains of latex and prosthetics, the makeup and hair team have successfully disguised Tom Hanks as this old fat man, which begs the question- why did you get Tom Hanks for this part? Mr. Hanks is an incredibly versatile actor, but there is a line. There are some parts people just don’t fit, and this is undeniably one of those cases. Add to this his big, wild swing at a Dutch accent, and you’re left with the actor’s strangest work since Cloud Atlas. That being said, while I have no idea what the thinking was behind this insanity, I was pretty entertained by it. Hanks is an incredible performer and he certainly gets to perform here. I honestly found this to be a more palatable version of what Jared Leto did in House of Gucci. In both cases, the actors made bizarre, over-the-top character choices with the assistance of heavy makeup, I just managed to see enough Hanks shine through that I wound up not not liking it. This is essentially a drag performance, which can actually be camp fun. It’s just jarring to see a performance like this share a scene with Austin Butler’s truly incredible recreation of The King. Just one of the infinite strange choices of Baz Luhrmann. Speaking of which…

2: What’s with the soundtrack?

In Luhrmann’s 2013 adaptation of The Great Gatsby, one of his strongest stylistic choices was to populate the soundtrack with anachronistic modern club music (this was to draw a parallel between the excess and partying of the story’s 1920’s setting and our own modern times) . In Elvis, Luhrmann… just does that again. I get that, in the past, the soundtracks to his films were best sellers and up for GRAMMYs, but it just doesn’t make thematic sense to fill the Elvis Presley biopic with anachronistic hip hop. In the scene where Elvis goes to record his famous “Hound Dog” record, why on Earth is Doja Cat rapping over the top of it? Is this just a thing Luhrmann likes to do now? Did we give him too much credit back in Gatsby? Maybe that wasn’t a metaphor, maybe he just makes deeply strange music choices all the time. 

3: Why is everybody Australian?

It’s weird that aside from Hanks, Butler, and a brief few minutes of Power of the Dog’s Kodi Smit-McPhee, this film’s cast is basically entirely comprised of unknown Australian character actors. It is weird that the Elvis movie only has one big star in it when other music biopics are filled with juicy supporting parts for well known actors. It’s especially weird when you then factor in that all of these unknown actors are also Australians doing American accents. That’s weird, right? Baz Luhrmann is a proud Australian who makes his movies in Australia. I get that. I respect that. And COVID definitely disrupted filming, leaving them to work with what they had available to them. But what they managed to put together features really bizarre casting choices, supporting the previously mentioned Tom Hanks. Elvis is an American icon and a cultural juggernaut. Pretty weird that his movie doesn’t reflect that a bit more. 

4: What was with this movie’s pacing?

Elvis is a very long movie with very uneven pacing. We spend only about the first 40 minutes covering the 1950’s, what many would consider his peak, and probably over an hour in the 70’s as he declined. That is also a really weird move. I get that, for dramatic purposes, his fall from grace is more compelling than his rise to stardom, but for a cradle-to-grave biography like this, you’d expect it to be a bit more even in its storytelling. By the time we’ve reached the halfway point of the film, several important plot points from earlier in his life seemed entirely insignificant. Why did we spend so much time with the segregationists fighting him in the 60’s if we don’t really come back to that again as the story progresses? Is that only there to check off the “this happened in real life” box? It’s just really uneven. Of course, at the same time, it would be a lie to say this movie is slow. Elvis is kinetic and constantly high energy to the point that it becomes overwhelming. It is an intense, over stimulating event that honestly played pretty well in a theater. Being surrounded by this movie is an experience, I’ll give it that.

5: This script sugarcoated a lot of history, huh?

A lot of the harder to swallow aspects of Presley’s life seem to have been given a sunnier makeover for this retelling. In the world of the film, he met his wife when she was “a teenager,” while we never learn Elvis’ age. In reality, she was 14 and he was a full decade older than her. We also get a pretty flattering depiction of his relationship with underrepresented Black musicians, and a rather light detour through his addictions, mostly at the end. I was expecting that in 2022 we would get a movie that painted him as the complicated person he was. Everything I just described carries complicated baggage this movie is simply not interested in exploring. Which brings to mind the question- if you’re not going to make the Elvis story through the filter of our modern sensibilities, why are you making the Elvis movie now?

6: Tom Hanks is covered in prosthetics, Austin Butler dyed his hair.

This one’s not really a question so much as a general comment. Austin Butler does not look much like Elvis Presley aside from the haircut, whereas Tom Hanks had to spend five hours a day in the makeup chair to play the Colonel. That seems odd to me. There is a period of time in the movie, primarily when it covers the mid 1960’s, that Butler does physically fit the iconic imagery of musical legend, but for most of the time that follows, he seems much too fit for how far The King had fallen by that point. And again, you put that next to whatever they thought they were doing with Tom Hanks and you get a bit of a disorienting watch.

7: Is Baz Luhrmann okay?

Everything I just described comes together, not just to tell the story of Elvis Presley, but to paint a picture of an auteur’s descent into madness. What seemed to be thematically linked insanity in his previous work is brought back up in Elvis for seemingly no reason. This movie feels like the product of Baz Luhrmann just kind of wildly doing whatever he wanted on screen, applied to the life story of Elvis at the last minute. The only person who can be blamed for the myriad of insane choices made in this movie is the director himself. This is Baz Luhrmann’s brain child. This is apparently what he thinks all movies should look like, regardless of their content. Baz Luhrmann had Cee Lo Green and Eminem write an original song for his Elvis movie. Is Baz Luhrmann okay?

An overwhelming and conceptually bewildering watch, Elvis is nonetheless an entirely enjoyable spectacle with an incredible central performance as the rock n’ roll pioneer. It is also absolutely insane.