Elvis: Baz Luhrmann's Tale of the King Hits the Stage Rocking, But Slows Down Over Time
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B
Elvis, Baz Luhrmann’s energetic, heightened iconography, begins from a hospital bed, with the Devil acting as his own advocate, a role he maintains with a thick Dutch accent as narrator through the movie’s two-and-a-half hours.
The infernal narrator is Elvis Presley’s notorious Svengali/manager Col. Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks at his most unrecognizable, under mounds of body latex that makes him look like Fat Bastard from Austin Powers.
Parker hallucinates that the world media, commentators and fans are all accusing him of “killing Elvis.” He denies this out loud, saying he created Elvis, as part of his search for the world’s greatest carny “sideshow,” a white boy who sings “coloured.”
Austin Butler and Tom Hanks in Elvis.
And we’re off to the races, as it were.
I imagine Luhrmann’s ears perked up at the word “sideshow” because he is nothing if not one of the most enthusiastic of film showmen. And this is never so clear as when he hits the first half-hour of Elvis out of the park. Its pace, at least in the early going, is breathless.
The boy King is first seen in the poor Black neighbourhood where his single mom Gladys (Helen Thomson) was forced to move (dad Vernon, played by Richard Roxburgh, was in jail for cheque fraud). And peeping through cracks in boards, the young Presley (Chaydon Jay) is entranced by a two-sided dose of Southern Black culture, lusty “dirty blues” in one venue in the form of Arthur (Big Boy) Crudup (Gary Clark Jr.) singing That’s All Right (Mama) , and a gospel church where the boy is drawn in as if by Jesus himself.
As images that encapsulate Elvis’s story go, it’s hard to beat an entire Black congregation physically lifting an enraptured white boy skyward.
It should be mentioned, Elvis more than gives the R&B side of rock ‘n’ roll its due, with actors playing Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh), B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola) and Little Richard (Alton Mason).
But getting back to the Colonel, he is, as they say, an unreliable witness. We see, and hear, his shaky defense of everything wrong he ever did. And he did plenty – discouraging Elvis’s hip-swiveling, trying to turn him into a family act, setting up his draft into the Army to cement that wholesome reputation, signing him to an array of cheesy movies, acting as middleman with the pill-pushing Dr. Nick, and arranging Elvis’s Vegas career to pay off his gambling debts.
In short, the Colonel is not so much a bad guy as a sociopath and opportunist. He has secrets, and Elvis (smoothly played as an adult by Austin Butler) spends most of his life between being manipulated and angrily trying to figure out what those secrets are.
The events of Presley’s life have been pretty much told, and Elvis’s tethering to reality may be its weakness. At a time when you’ve got a Pablo Larrain directing gothic tone poems about the private hells of Jackie Kennedy and Princess Di, there might have been room for Luhrmann to freak us out a bit more.
Still, the characters who shaped Presley’s early life and career are well drawn. Canadian-born country legend Hank Snow (David Wenham) is pure disgruntlement as the headliner who regrets having the carnal Presley on his show, and is further put off when his son, Jimmie Rodgers Snow (Kodi Smit-McPhee) comes to idolize the rock ‘n’ roller.
Meanwhile, Elvis’s wife Priscilla is played with personality by Olivia DeJonge (the teenage wife-to-be is usually played like a doll of some kind). And I’ll probably never think of Graceland again without envisioning chickens being chased out of it by Elvis’s kin.
The energy Elvis brings to its first act is hard to maintain over that extended length of time. And the final-Vegas “fat Elvis” years succumb at times to lugubriousness. Still, Butler is all in, from the hyperkinetic moves of young-Elvis to the jumpsuits of later years.
As many of these movies do at the end, there are jumps to the movie’s actual subject in performance. Butler and Elvis himself are spliced, and damned if it isn’t hard to tell who’s who at that point.
Elvis. Directed by Baz Luhrmann. Starring Tom Hanks, Austin Butler and Olivia DeJonge. Opens Friday, June 24.