It has been nearly a decade since director Baz Luhrmann has made a feature film. That is not a bad thing as I think he has a perfect record of making only dross up to now. His cringeworthy debut Strictly Ballroom was followed by the worst Shakespeare adaptation I have seen – Romeo + Juliet – and the the embarrassingly bad Moulin Rouge. His last two movies have been the overblown Australia and messy Great Gatsby. In typical style, his Elvis biopic clocks in at 2 hours 40 minutes, attempting to portray his life story in that time.
But as we are firmly into summer with kids films taking up all the screens of the multiplexes near me, I decided to give Luhrmann another chance. In the first part of the film, my fears were realised. Pyrotechnic camera work, a silly framing device using an elderly Colonel Tom Parker and a pointless animated sequence all add up to Baz’s usual bombastic bluster, putting style ahead of coherent storytelling. There is one particularly painfully on-the-nose scene where a young Elvis discovers blues and gospel music simultaneously showing that both styles will inspire him in the future. Subtle it ain’t.
But then, something happens in the middle part of the movie covering his first signs of success up to the 1968 Comeback Special. Luhrmann allows the film to breathe. This time covers Elvis’ connection with black music more thoroughly, and the most thrilling musical moments occur. The racist authorities attempts to tone down his performances and threats to put him in jail are really interesting, and we get the best Elvis musical sequence with his performance of Trouble at a charity event.
After the peak of The Comeback Special, the rest of the movie is a deflating experience. His time in Vegas was a low-point creatively and this period of his life is drawn out for a painfully long time, though strangely it shirks away from showing Elvis’ weight problems. The use of the “caught in a trap” line from Suspicious Minds to illustrate how he could not escape the Colonel’s clutches was again unnecessarily on-the-nose. Maybe Lurhmann could have got away with that once, but after five or six times, it felt ridiculous.
Of the performances, both Austin Butler in the title role and Tom Hanks as the controlling Parker are pretty good, dominating the film, so no one else makes much of an impression.
A very uneven film then, that in the end, falls into the same trap as so many other biopics; trying to show a whole life story, rather than concentrate on one event or period, and cover it in detail. I would rate this as the director’s best film but it is still deeply flawed.
Rating: 5.5 out of 10