Kurt Russell, Don Johnson, Jonathan Reese Myers, Michael Shannon – these and others have previously played Elvis Presley on television. But it is only now, 55 years after his death at the age of 42, that his biography reaches the big screen – and its main star is actually Tom Hanks in the role of promoter. Elvis is played by the almost anonymous Austin Butler, who invests his soul in the role and manages to convince us that he is the king of rock’n’roll. He sings in his own voice, and strikes a very physical appearance, sexy and charismatic, but he also penetrates below the surface. And he’s so similar to Elvis, that when the original appeared on screen at the end of the film, I was not sure which of the two I was watching. Butler’s casting is the one right thing the film does. Everything else is a mistake.
It is difficult to almost impossible to summarize a person’s entire life in a film, even if his life was as short as Elvis’s. I’ve already written here that some of the more successful film biographies, like that of Brian Wilson from The Beach Boys, have focused on limited periods of time. But Buzz Lorman decided he wanted everything anywhere at once, and came out with nothing. Lorman has a known tendency for excessive exaggeration – visual and vocal density, dizzying camera movements, music editing, and this time also masses of split screens. It is a cinema as a show of fireworks, combined with laser beams with rain of glitter. But what somehow worked in “Moulin Rouge,” and to a lesser extent in “The Great Gatsby,” is this time brought to such an extreme that it flattens the drama and does not allow for an emotional connection to the film. The “Plot” Algae ran through highs in Elvis’ life from his childhood in Memphis through Hollywood (at the tip of the fork) to the end in Las Vegas, and there seemed to be a ten-hour movie here crammed into forty-two hours, two hours of which were edited like a trailer. May four hours long). It also hurts the soundtrack – over and over again we hear the beginnings of songs mixed with the beginnings of other songs, and then they are interrupted (although the film is endowed with a generous budget, it may be a royalty-saving savings strategy).
In an attempt to provide a framework for this mess, “Elvis” is presented, ostensibly, from the point of view of the infamous promoter, Colonel Tom Parker, whose background story remains mysterious. As the film’s narrator, he introduces himself to viewers as someone who was perceived as a villain, and tries to convince us that he was not like that. But the film shows us that he took over the life of the boy from Memphis, built his career, then strangled her, and Elvis, for the purpose of covering his gambling debts. This narrative strategy could have been interesting, but it is not properly developed, and Hanks’ casting turns out to be a serious mistake. Lorman apparently wanted to produce seconds in viewers ‘attitudes toward the promoter through Hanks’ endearing persona, the most beloved actor of the past thirty years on and off screen. But a fat suit and heavy makeup make him a kind of mutant, and he adds a weird accent and submits to the worst performance of his career. The rest of the cast, including Australian Richard Roxberg as Elvis’ father, Australian Helen Thomson as his mother, and Australian Olivia DeJong as Persilla, don’t really get a chance to make an impression.
The problem is not only in Hanks and the aggressive directing, but also in the flickering script that Lorman co-wrote. Presley has often been accused of stealing his style, and his hits, from black musicians who could not break forward in the racist America of the 1950s. On the other hand, the film presents him not only as a housemate of a black music club in Memphis (and as a friend of the B.B. King), but also, almost, as much as possible, as an activist for blacks (according to film biographies, all white musicians in America were black activists) ). I was not convinced. Some of the more beautiful scenes in the film are filmed in the same club, but the film cuts them off too quickly and skips to other places and times. And in the midst of all this the script does not offer interesting insights about Elvis and his place in American culture, beyond the fact that he brought the girls to orgasmic ecstasy and challenged the conservatives. In the 1990s I visited the Graceland Estate in Memphis, and that glimpse into his home provided me with a more intimate impression of who he was.
After about two noisy and exhausting hours, as if done on speeds, the film finally slows down and develops some dramatic scenes in which Elvis, finally, tries to break free of Parker’s suffocating grip and do what he wants – choose his own songs, go on a world tour. Then “Elvis” becomes a typical cinematic biography, with some good songs presented in their entirety. But by this point I was already alienated from the film to such an extent that I could no longer respond to the King’s request to love him gently.
★★✯ 2.5 stars
Elvis Directed by: Buzz Lorman. With Austin Butler, Tom Hanks. USA 2022, 159 min