Elvis (2022)
Baz Luhrmann's Elvis is a maximalist, brilliant, occasionally overwhelming tribute that frames its subject as the American myth he became.
From the Author
American mythology operates differently from the mythological traditions of older cultures. It does not primarily elevate warriors or gods but elevates specific human beings, people whose lives and deaths come to represent something that the culture needs them to mean, and it confers a form of immortality on them that reshapes the original person into something that serves the culture's needs rather than their own. Babe Ruth, Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali, Judy Garland all are figures whose actual lives and their mythological afterlives have been in tension, if not direct conflict, for decades. Elvis Presley is perhaps the purest example of this process, a man from Tupelo whose relationship to the music and the culture that formed him became, in the hands of the entertainment industry and the broader culture, something so thoroughly reprocessed that the original is almost invisible beneath it. Baz Luhrmann's Elvis is the first major attempt to use the mythological status as the film's formal subject rather than its background, and it is one of the most formally audacious biopics produced by a major American studio.
The film frames Elvis's story through the narration of Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), his longtime manager and the man who controlled, exploited, and arguably destroyed him. Parker's narration is explicitly unreliable: he addresses the camera as a man attempting to rehabilitate his own legacy, and the film periodically ruptures his account by showing the audience what actually happened alongside what Parker wants them to believe. The device is borrowed from Amadeus, which structured its portrait of Mozart through the self-serving account of Salieri, and it serves the same function: it allows the film to be simultaneously a story about its subject and a story about the forces that shaped public understanding of that subject.
Austin Butler's performance is the film's irreplaceable element and the thing that makes everything else possible. The physical transformation he achieves is only the most visible aspect of a performance that locates Elvis's specific quality of charisma from within rather than through imitation. The early performance sequences are among the most kinetically exciting concert recreations in biographical filmmaking, not because Butler is doing what Elvis did but because Butler is doing what Butler understands Elvis was doing, and the distinction produces something that feels like an artistic act rather than impersonation. His Academy Award nomination will be among the year's most earned.
Hanks's Parker is a creation of a different register: a cartoon of a specific kind of American opportunism, performed with a commitment that makes the character's grotesquerie productive rather than simply excessive. The prosthetics and the accent are both conspicuous, and the film knows they are, using Parker's performed identity as a comment on the performance of identity that is the film's broader subject.
The film has been criticized for its length and its maximalism, and both criticisms are accurate descriptions rather than complaints. Elvis runs two hours and thirty-nine minutes and is directed with the deliberate excess of a filmmaker whose entire aesthetic is built around the argument that restraint is the wrong response to certain subjects. Luhrmann's Baz-ness is not a liability here but a feature: Elvis's life was excess, his music was excess, his cultural impact was excess, and a sober prestige drama would have been the wrong container for it. The film's visual language, its editing rhythms, its willingness to crash genres and eras and registers against each other, is itself a formal argument about what Elvis meant and how.
The sections of the film that locate Elvis within the political and cultural upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s work with varying success, but the sequence in which his television special reconnects him to his roots against the backdrop of the civil rights movement is among the year's finest pieces of filmmaking. Elvis is being played in premium format theaters and is worth every minute of its runtime.
