Review: the flash and sparkle of Elvis
Towards the end of Elvis, a new biopic of the great American singer by director Baz Luhrmann, there’s a scene where Mr. Presley (played with astonishing physical and spiritual command by Austin Butler), bids adieu to his estranged wife, Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge), before flying back to Las Vegas. It’s 1975, and the casino-bound, pill-popping rock-and-roller is being considered for a lead role in the remake of A Star is Born (‘76).
The project would represent an opportunity for Elvis to make a great movie, something he’s always dreamed of. But when Priscilla asks him whether or not he’ll do it, he scoffs at the idea.
“Just imagine,” the King drawls. “Barbra, and the Colonel?”
“The Colonel,” of course, refers to one Colonel Tom Parker (a refreshingly sinister Tom Hanks), Presley’s longtime manager. Mysterious and cajoling, the Colonel has exerted enormous if not total power over the trajectory of his client’s career ever since discovering Presley as a punk kid, wearing eyeliner and pink suits, playing on local Southern radio and pounding the pavement in Memphis.
The reason his client, twenty years later, laughs at the thought of making A Star is Born is because it would mean placing the Colonel in the path of Barbra — i.e., Streisand. In a movie that tends to spell things out, this reference is a refreshing in-joke for those of us in the audience who already know something of the cultural era in which Mr. Presley lived and worked.
I can’t help wondering at what that movie would have been like — and I think it’s worth asking whether a figure of even Ms. Streisand’s gravitas could quite compare to the electric immensity that was Elvis.
Sure enough, the collaboration never happened. And two years later, the singer died from a heart attack while sitting on the toilet, constipated and bereft. We never see this final act in the King’s life in Luhrmann’s movie — though Butler does reenact one of Presley’s final TV performances, a stirring cover of “Unchained Melody.” He dons a fat suit, and heaves with heartbreaking vulnerability, before being swapped out half-way through the song with archival footage of the man himself.
The control of Elvis’ narrative is a major focus of this movie, both onscreen and off, and it’s clear from moments like this just how much of the ugliness, the promiscuity, the seediness and desperation of the man is kept hidden in the wings.
Yet what does appear onscreen is certainly worth its weight in gold records. We witness Col. Parker’s varying attempts to exploit his great musical discovery — first by plucking him from obscurity with promises of wealth for his family (especially his beloved mother, Gladys, played by Helen Thomson), then by taking him on the road and capitalizing on Presley’s pop appeal once he’d broken into the mainstream. Of course, this “pop” element is what might be most efficiently identified as whiteness; no sooner has Elvis made it to the top of the charts on the strength of R&B than he must be “cleaned up,” or made “safe” for conservative white onlookers. With fame comes visibility, and the McCarthy-era 1950s were vicious in their assault on any sort of integration, be it in schools, in buses, or in music.
Longstanding critics of Presley have pointed to his use of Black American music as theft or appropriation, but Luhrmann’s movie positions the singer as something of a political dissident. It is easy to forget just how harrowing the attacks against Presley were, just as it’s easy to misplace fury at pervasive racism in the music industry by wagging fingers at his cover of “Hound Dog.” To place oneself at the intersection of Black and white cultural identity was radical, for it at once challenged the sanctity of whiteness and elevated Black art to a position of validity.
Whether or not he was the most responsible or articulate of activists, in the earliest years of his career Elvis Presley embodied a fundamental shift in how America thought about itself. His exile to the armed forces — or, as it’s commonly referred to, his “military service” — represented an institutional effort to rehabilitate, or annihilate the singer’s “controversial” image.
His hair was buzzed short; he went without makeup. He wore a uniform. He was stripped of color, of life, of ambiguity. He became another soldier of empire.
Color is one thing, however, that Mr. Luhrmann’s movies never go without. From the MTV-saturated, youthful vigor of Romeo + Juliet (1996) to the vivacious and romantic jukebox poignancy of Moulin Rouge! (‘01), to the breakneck flapper-era flash of The Great Gatsby (‘13), the polarizing Australian filmmaker has always been bold, zesty and ambitious. It is easy to dismiss his work as grandiose, on-the-nose and, perhaps most pressingly, untrusting of audience. He has a tendency of spelling out essential information for his viewers via voiceover and garish intertitles, so that, at times, one is left wishing that he’d give his audience a little credit.
But then again, that may in fact be Mr. Luhrmann’s strength: he does give us credit, and he does so by delivering feats of cinematic vision that meet us exactly where we’d like to be met. Subtlety has never been Mr. Luhrmann’s game — but then again, nor was it ever Elvis.’ Both men know how to play to the crowd, and if you are even remotely responsive to Presley’s hopped-up, shook-up, hyper-emotional style, you’ll surely have a helluva time watching this rather fitting interpretation of him.
The King has finally got his “serious” picture. Elvis is a sweeping, lush orchestration of the life and legend of Mr. Presley — a movie if there ever was one.
