ELVIS (2022) is So Sublimely Silly, It Somehow Circles Back to a Kind of Brilliance
A review of the Baz Luhrmann film.
“Those who hate your son will do so whether we profit from it or not. After all, what is hate worth if it’s free?”
Elvis feels like the opening 10 minutes of Michael Mann’s Ali, or one of those feverishly exhilarating montages from one of Oliver Stone’s good movies, but stretched out over an insanely jam-packed two and a half hours.
Generally speaking, movies presented as excessively extended music videos, and/or hours-long teaser trailers for themselves, should not work — and have not worked — in any remotely satisfying way (2016’s Suicide Squad being a prime example, especially given the theatrical cut’s notorious late-in-post-production editorial butchering by a trailer house). Yet under the hyperactively kinetic directorial vision of Baz Luhrmann, it all somehow cohesively gels better than you’d expect, the bawdy spectacle of garish Americana excess inherent to Elvis’s iconography a rhinestoned match made in heaven with Luhrmann’s unabashed love of over-the-top aesthetic absurdity. It’s a positively electric viewing experience, a cinematic adrenaline shot to the heart that I for one couldn’t help but be swept up by, even with the soberly dark rejoinder of Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla in the back of my mind keeping me grounded in remembering Elvis is obviously far, far away from a complete or objective picture of the man who would be The King.
The only reason Elvis isn’t completely kneecapped into redundancy by the existence of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story’s evergreenly genius music-biopic spoofery — as was one of the biggest downfalls of Bohemian Rhapsody — is because of Baz Luhrmann’s tongue-in-cheek, excitably maximalist, and endearingly, earnestly corny tendencies practically rendering his Elvis a parody of itself in advance. Instead of wincing away from the undeniable silliness of its primary subject that other biopics would downplay to try and come across more prestigious and acceptable, Luhrmann wholeheartedly embraces and turns up the dial on the high-camp ridiculousness of the circumstances surrounding Elvis’s rise to fame. How can you not laugh at Baz presenting Presley’s provocative hip-wiggling dancing as this Austin Powers-esque supernatural explosion of mojo, shot forth like invisible blasts with every thrust of Elvis’s pelvis, the women in the audience getting infected en masse with a delirious unbridled horniness that 1950's-era society’s white patriarchal conservative repression hasn’t prepared them for? The way the first of these sequences is shot, with all those digital crash-zooms and the speed-ramping in and out of slow-motion as Elvis’s gyrations give the audience excitations, makes it look like we’re just one sentient erection away from this turning into The Daniels’ ‘Turn Down For What’ music video!
It’s hysterical, in every sense of the word.
Almost as much as the moment with the delightfully preposterous mashup of ‘Viva Las Vegas’ with Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic’, which is when I was like: “BAZ, I LOVE YOU SO MUCH RIGHT NOW, YOU ABSOLUTE MAD LAD.”
That’s one of the few overlaps in stylistic intent that Luhrmann’s Elvis and Coppola’s Priscilla happen to share: the blending of period-accurate songs with deliberately anachronistic needle drops of more current songs and artists, crafting eclectic soundtracks that recontextualise the old-timey musical landscape in a way that makes you better comprehend how fresh these songs felt when they were brand new.
Of course, it’s a common (yet effective) trick for period dramas to use musical anachronism as a means to transport modern-day audiences into the past in a way that makes it feel vibrantly present and alive. Steven Knight’s Peaky Blinders, Steven Soderbergh’s The Knick, Damian Chazelle’s Babylon, Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, and Shutter Island, AND Killers of the Flower Moon… hell, even Baz Luhrmann’s own Moulin Rouge and The Great Gatsby, plus Coppola’s own Marie Antoinette, all used this technique before. Nonetheless, the audaciousness of Elvis’s bananas mixing of genres and artists and time periods they hail from is one of its greatest joys.
(Side note/question about Priscilla’s soundtrack that only occurred to me the day after watching it: did Sofia Coppola and her music supervisors use Carl Orff’s ‘Gassenhauer’ during the proposal scene, so as to slyly reference Hans Zimmer’s ‘Gassenhauer’-mimicking score for True Romance, which as you’ll recall famously featured Val Kilmer playing a recurring imaginary apparition of Elvis Presley? Food for thought.)
Inexorably, the thorny presence of Priscilla acts as a comparatively down-to-earth, and wholly necessary tonic for Elvis’s grandiose eccentricities and hagiographic omissions of inconvenient truths that would puncture the mythic narrative the Elvis estate would undoubtedly prefer people remember, and which I’m sure die-hard fans of his music would be happy to maintain complicity with so they can continue enjoying his songs as they always have. (I live a mere 15–20 minute bus ride away from Porthcawl, the seaside town in South Wales that annually hosts one of the biggest Elvis celebrations in the world, where locals and tourists dress up as him, do karaoke of his songs, and go all out on memorialising his image, even going so far as displaying and waving around Confederate flags, which is… troubling… so I’m sure they’re the kinds of folks who’d opt more for Elvis’s Elvis than Priscilla’s Elvis.)
The thing is, once you’ve seen Priscilla, you can’t un-see the pieces of critical information Elvis’s script conveniently misplaces from the narrative.
Luhrmann’s film only broaches the specifics of the age gap between Elvis and Priscilla in the line where Elvis says: “When you’re 40 and I’m 50, we’ll be together again.” Their introduction during Elvis’s army service stint in Germany is glossed over with the voiceover from Tom Hanks’ “Colonel” Tom Parker bemoaning how he failed to predict Elvis falling in love, and a scene where Elvis and Priscilla have some rom-com banter in his bedroom. Olivia DeJonge’s performance is solid, don’t get me wrong, but the dialogue she’s given, and the way she delivers it, all makes her look and sound older than Priscilla actually was in that moment. Elvis never tells you that when they met and “fell in love”, she was 14, and he was 24, because if it did divulge this, you couldn’t watch their blossoming relationship as being some aspirational fantasy love story you could swoon over; you’d see it as a calculated rewriting of history, made to benefit the legacy of the man seen grooming the underage girl right before your eyes. And yes, while you can argue that since the entire film is told through the unreliable narration of “Colonel” Tom Parker, and that it probably didn’t matter enough to him to bring it up when the story is fundamentally about him vindicating himself in our eyes, while extolling Elvis’s virtues as “the greatest show on earth”… you can still tell that it’s a choice of editorial damage control, an authorised biopic playing nice with the real people overseeing their work, so as to not lose out on making the movie in the first place.
In many respects, Elvis (the film) is really good, and really bad. It’s artistically valuable, and it’s blatant propaganda. It’s heartfelt, and it’s cynical. It’s unconventional, and it’s the most conventional and clichéd collection of music biopic tropes. It’s genuinely moving, and it’s emotionally manipulative. You can love it to bits, and hate things about it to its very core.
But what is for certain is that Austin Butler’s enormously dedicated hard work — no matter how ruthlessly clowned on he’s been by people afterwards — was worth it to have delivered what has to be one of the greatest biopic performances I’ve ever seen… and that this is waaaaaaay better than Bohemian Rhapsody ever was, or ever will be, and god I hate that movie so so SO much…
Originally published January 8th 2024 at https://jackandersonkeane.substack.com.
