Elvis
159 minutes; PG-13
Critic’s grade: A-“Elvis is everywhere,” roots-rocking revivalists Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper declare on the 1987 novelty hit of the same name. The video features shots of the duo and Elvis Presley interspersed with images of average folks of every age, race, sex, body type and nationality dressed up like the American icon or showing off their Elvis-inspired products.
“Elvis is everything,” Nixon sings. “Elvis is everybody/ Elvis is still the King/ Man, O, man/ What I want you to see/ Is that the big E’s/ Inside of you and me, yeah.”|
To be sure, Elvis was still everywhere back then, 10 years after his untimely if not altogether unexpected death at age 42. Impersonators of the King flourished at Las Vegas wedding chapels and on stages all over the country. “Elvis has left the building,” fried-peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, and TCB — “taking care of business” — were still touchstones.
Elvis gold chains and license plates continued to pop up all over the place, and Graceland routinely swarmed with tourists (and lent its name to a Paul Simon album released the year prior). Countless folks swore that they had seen Presley’s face in the clouds or on a piece of toast. Some said that they had run into the flesh-and-blood man himself at a gas station, a barbershop, or the mall. Multiple pop stars pointed to Elvis as a musical forebear and major influence.
The subject of ritualistic, near-religious and maybe slightly creepy devotion, Elvis seemed to be more alive during the three decades or so after his death of a cardiac arrest — which occurred on the throne, as the crass joke went (he expired on his bathroom floor) — than he’d been in the last few chapters of his troubled life. He was gone too soon, thanks to a weak heart aggravated by a dependence on drugs and alcohol, probably worsened by a terrible diet and other maladies. Fun fact: his complete autopsy will finally be unsealed in 5 years.
Thirty-five years after “Elvis is Everywhere,” the King no longer holds sway over pop culture to the degree that he once did. But with “Elvis,” filmmaker Baz Luhrmann performs imaginative rites of onscreen zombieism: He practically brings the movie’s title character back from the dead for the viewing and listening pleasure of contemporary audiences, at least a couple of generations of whom weren’t born until after Presley died. That’s no mean feat, and the results are largely a delight to behold.
Luhrmann, the Australian-born director and high-concept movie magician, created an unstoppable audiovisual carnival with 2001’s “Moulin Rouge!,” gave new life to Shakespeare with his refried “Romeo + Juliet” in 1996, and reimagined F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel of the 1920s with “The Great Gatsby,” released in 2013.
“Elvis,” arriving nearly a decade after Luhrmann’s last film, is a sometimes intoxicating mixtape of Elvis-ness, a wannabe cosmic collage of the Saturday night Delta blues, Sunday morning tent-revival gospel, pure charisma & hip-swiveling sexiness that helped transform the Tupelo country kid and devoted Mama’s boy into an enduring global celebrity. It’s mostly big fun, with a whole lotta shakin’ going on.
Is “Elvis” truly greater than the sum of its hyperactive, swirling, in-your-face, time-tripping parts, not all of which match the level of Austin Butler‘s fascinating and gripping impersonation of The King? Not sure yet.
But Luhrmann once again demonstrates his ability to reach out, grab viewers, and hold on to us nearly all the way to the end, when he closes more than two-and-one-half hours of passion, pathos, drama and humor in the life of this Elvis incarnation with footage of the real thing. It’s a coda that, yes, may make some viewers feel a bit of sadness about the loss of an era that — nominally, at least, from the vantage point of 2022’s social, political and economic turmoil — seems less confusing and more innocent.
If the “Elvis” movie were a stage of its subject’s career, it would be the Fat Elvis years, when “Also Sprach Zarathustra” on the sound system announced his arrival on a Vegas stage with an oversized band. His shows were exercises in too-muchness, over the top and proud to be born that way. That’s in contrast to the early years, when he led a rootsy, stripped-down band, recording raw, intimate-feeling tracks like 1954’s “That’s All Right” at Sun Studios in Memphis and then making a splash at local auditoriums.
Likewise, Luhrmann’s extravaganza of a movie is all about the excess, dazzling viewers with a relentless, frenetic assault of sights and sounds bolstering a story that’s probably too large to tell within the confines of a movie of this length.
Luhrmann begins by connecting the dots among the various sounds that influenced Elvis’s approach to music making — in the movie, it’s “I’ll Fly Away” in its bluegrass and black gospel versions, and the blues of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “That’s All Right Mama” and Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog.” Austin blues star Gary Clark Jr. plays Crudup, and the late Shonka Dukureh portrays Thornton.
Frequently flashing forward and back, Luhrmann touches on many of the familiar mileposts on Elvis’s road to superstardom. Most chapters are here, if not necessarily presented according to the real-life timeline. After Frank Sinatra’s adulation by the bobby soxers but before crowds went gaga for the Beatles, Elvis makes the girls hyperventilate — on stage at the Louisiana Hayride country music radio show, his first of many appearances there. He signs a lopsided management deal giving half of his earnings to shady Dutch-born promoter “Colonel” Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), a former Tampa dogcatcher who declares that “show business is snow business.”
Then: Elvis leaves Sun for RCA Records, buys the Graceland mansion, goes into the Army, suffers the loss of his beloved mother Gladys (Helen Thomson), and marries Priscilla Parker (Olivia DeJonge); the two met cute — or creepy cute? — in Germany when he was 24 and she was 14 (her age is glossed over).
Along the way — in addition to the above mentioned artists — there are encounters with entertainers B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), Little Richard (Alton Mason), Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola), Hank Snow (David Wenham), Jimmie Rodgers (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and of course Sun Studios owner Sam Phillips (Josh McConville).
The cast is well chosen: All turn in galvanizing performances, and Yola, Mason, Clark and Dukureh (who died July 21 at age 44) are straight-up knockouts. The tasty soundtrack is bolstered by vintage and recent material, including some snatches of hip-hop; all work well together to underscore the action.
Parker is the teller of this tale, with some passages deploying his voiceover narration. If “Elvis” is flawed, that positioning could be part of the problem — it frequently feels a bit artificial and contrived. Maybe that’s because of Hanks, who seems to be walking through a role that comes off as corny, and too heavily relies on a goofy, showy accent. Would the performance have been enhanced had it been played by someone less famous than Hanks?
Anyone with at least a passing interest in Elvis, or a thing for the roots of modern pop music and/or that period of history, will want to see Luhrmann’s movie on the big screen, with speakers cranked. The nostalgia buzz at the heart of “Elvis” is real.
And yet Luhrmann’s movie is about more than simply reanimating a cultural corpse. The filmmaker’s apparently genuine affection for everything Elvis has resulted in a blast of giddy Americana that may prove infectious even to those who know The King only as a faded, easily mocked musical curio from the increasingly distant past.
Word is that there also exists a four-hour director’s cut of the movie that includes Elvis’s off-the-rails encounter with President Nixon and pays more attention to Presley’s relationship with his bandmates, guitarist Scotty Moore (Xavier Samuel) and bassist Bill Black (Adam Dunn).
I wouldn’t be surprised if an Elvis series were to be announced for one of the streamers — just speculating here. Stay tuned, and keep your eyes open for a sighting of The King at your local diner. Hey, it could happen.