A good-enough story can withstand more or less any direction, and thats the extent of the artistic success that Baz Luhrmann achieves with Elvis. The rise of a Memphis truck driver to a generational hero and a world icon, under the thumb of his Mephistophelian manager, and his fall to the status of a mere self-destructive celebrity who became an object of nostalgia while still young is amazing enough, in its arc and its details, to hold attention even in the course of a garish and simplistic two hours and thirty-nine minutes. Elvis is a gaudily decorated Wikipedia article that owes little to its sense of style; its a film of substance, but of bare substance, a mere photographic replica of a script that both conveys and squanders the power of Presleys authentic tragedy.
Luhrmann squeezes his name into the credits more times and more quickly than any other director Ive seen, aided by the idiosyncrasies of contractual punctuation: its a Baz Luhrmann film, from a story by Baz Luhrmann and Jeremy Doner and a screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Sam Bromell and Baz Luhrmann & Craig Pearce and Jeremy Doner, and its directed by Baz Luhrmann. His style does more than leave smudgy fingerprints all over the material; its calculatedly obtrusive, as if to give viewers a thumb in the eye. But the key to Luhrmanns act of cinematic aggression is less its vain embellishment than its weird, misguided, yet deeply revealing premise: it thrusts Presleys predatory manager, Colonel Tom Parker, front and center.
The character of Colonel Tom is embodied by the movies one above-the-title-sized star, Tom Hanks, who plays the role with a slimy, serpentine monotony under transformative costumes and makeup (Parker was fat and bald) and a chewy, indistinct accent (Parker was born and raised in the Netherlands). Hanks is the films narrator as well as a main onscreen presence alongside Presley, whose life and art are related from Colonel Toms perspective. Indeed, the drama of Elvis is the musicians effort to become, in effect, the protagonist of his own life, to fulfill his own plans and dreams rather than the requirements of Elvis Presley the business, which was run by Parker. The movie is even framed as a flashback from Parkers collapse, just before his death in 1997; its drama is launched by a self-justifying and self-unaware monologue in which Colonel Tom denies any responsibility for Presleys death in 1977.
Colonel Tom takes credit for Elviss career (I made him), and adds that he and Elvis were partners, as the snowman and the showman. Parkers own career as an impresario started at travelling carnivals; he calls himself a snowman because hes capable of delivering a snow job on anyone for anything. Though he recognizes the originality of Elviss fusion of blues and country music, he sees Elvis not as an artist but as a showman, indeed as the greatest show on Eartha circus slogan, and the antithesis of earnest musicianship. But who was this miraculous hybrid? In come flashbacks to the backstory, of Elviss father, Vernon (Richard Roxburgh), incarcerated for passing a fraudulent check, and of the familys move to a Black neighborhood in Tupelo, Mississippi. There, in 1947, young Elvis (Chaydon Jay) makes Black friends and accompanies them to the areas two musical attractions: a roadhouse where Arthur (Big Boy) Crudup (Gary Clark, Jr.) plays electric blues, and a Pentecostal church where the revival service is filled with ecstatic gospel music and where Elvis, the only white person there, does more than listenhe plunges into the center of the service, dancing and flinging himself into the throng. Cut to Sun Records, where Elvis performs a cover of Crudups Thats All Right and the companys owner, Sam Phillips (Josh McConville), declares that the nineteen-year-old Elvis is playing Black music.
Throughout the film, Elviss bona fides in the Black community are emphasized, especially in his early and crucial friendship with B. B. King (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) and with other important characters in Elviss musical rise, including Big Mama Thornton, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Little Richard (played by Shonka Dukureh, Yola, and Alton Mason, respectively). When Elvis passes through Black crowds in Memphiss Beale Street, they lovingly swarm him for autographs. But what makes Elvis an original, in the movies view, is more than his fusion of Black and white traditions; its the sexual frenzy that he whips up when he gets onstage, at an outdoor concert, with long hair and makeup that prompts a young white man (at a segregated show) to call him by a homophobic slur. At first hesitant at the mike, Elvis launches into a song, and his sinuous, thrusting moves conspicuously excite the young women in the crowd. His bassist, Bill Black (Adam Dunn), leans over and advises him to wiggle much more; when Elvis does, women scream in ecstasy and men are scandalized. Parker apostrophizes in voice-over, as he watches an excited woman, that shes having feelings she wasnt sure she should enjoythis unleashed Elvis is her forbidden fruit. He adds, It was the greatest carnival attraction Id ever seen.
Whatever pleasure Elvis manifestly feels in making music, his core motives are to make enough money for his parents to live in comfort; he promises his mother, Gladys (Helen Thomson), a pink Cadillac when he makes it big. But Gladys sees the dangeror, rather, telegraphs the rest of the movie when she warns him about the dangers of pursuing wealth, and adds that she saw something in the reaction of his audience that could come between them. That thing, of course, is fame, the bond with the public that makes him a commander of hearts and minds but also the victim of his devotees. He is mobbed in the street; the Presley family property is invaded by fans; police have to hold the crowds back from the stage at his concerts. Elvis is a cautionary tale about the predatory power of modern media and the uncontrollable force of fandomthe cult of personality that neglects and devours the person concealed in the plain sight of the public image. (Elvis is one of two new releases that dramatize the toxicity of fandom and sudden celebrity, the other being Marcel the Shell With Shoes On.)
The overt sexuality that Elvis displays is a source of scandal, denunciation, and legal threats, and, for Colonel Tom, a possible financial liability. From trying to sanitize Elviss public image and create a new Elvis (the public responds the way it responded, three decades later, to New Coke) to turning him all-American when hes drafted into the Army, Colonel Tom interferes with Elviss art and life alike, putting showmanship, celebrity, and publicity ahead of the musicians imperatives. Colonel Tom has a criminal past in the Netherlands and deserted from the U.S. Army; he is, unbeknownst to Elvis, undocumented and imperilled. He maneuvers and manipulates Elvis with secret deals that keep him virtually entombed in Las Vegas, exhausting himself emotionally and musically to feed his audiences nightly frenzies, jolted onstage each night through the medical depredations of a doctor for hire (Tom Nixon). Unsurprisingly, Colonel Tom exonerates himself from Elviss death at the age of forty-two. He says that Elvis was indeed addictedto the love that he got from you, the audience. He sums up: Ill tell you what killed him: it was lovehis love for you. The onus is on the members of the audience and their deadly effect on their superstar.
Luhrmann depicts Elvis as a pre-modern figure, an artist whose public image is somewhere between a phenomenon independent of his artistry and a means of advertising created by his business team. Elviss movie career proves to be mostly a disaster, despite some commercial success: its inescapable uncoolness impinges on his musical career and is an artistic failure in Elviss own eyes. (He dreamed of following in the footsteps of James Dean as a dramatic actor.) Elvis places great emphasis on his return to musical purity in his 1968 television special, and sets it against the political turmoil of the time, including the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. The movie aims to show that Elvis strove to keep up with his moment, including politically, and only Colonel Toms blanding-out, old-fashioned handling of him got in the way. When Elviss star is falling, his manager riffs on how its not the Colonels fault that the world has changed. Yet one of the key things that changed was media consciousness itself and its relation to the new rock mainstreammost obvious in the Beatless self-aware media politics, their recognition of the inseparability of their art from their image, their image from their life, and their postmodern deployment of their fame in A Hard Days Night.
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Elvis Is a Wikipedia Entry Directed by Baz Luhrmann - The New Yorker