Cannes: Austin Butler performs in a manner worthy of the king, but is buried alive under a roller coaster of weak biological troops.
“It doesn’t matter if you make 10 stupid ones as long as you make one smart one,” Colonel Tom Parker advises us near the start of Baz Luhrmann’s musical biopic about the king of rock & roll, but even a proportion that forgiving would still leave “Elvis” about 370 “smart” short. If only this 159-minute pity — a sadistically monotonous super-montage in which a strange flamenco boy manipulates over and over again until they both get sad and die — were kind enough to be so short on any other. aspects. .
Luhrmann may be one of the most irrepressible maximalists the film has ever known, and his new work is perhaps the most visually anarchic Hollywood film since the Wachowskis’ 2008 “Speed Racer.” But it’s hard to find even an ironic enjoyment in something so high on its own; something far less interested in how his namesake broke the rules than in how his director does it, and something tirelessly unable to find any significant overlap between the two.
In fact, “Elvis” loves his style and is so disinterested in his subject that “Baz” would have been a more appropriate title for him. Why a deliriously basic musical biopic that spins in time at 60 million rpm takes longer to give Elvis Presley the “Bohemian Rhapsody” treatment than Luhrmann needed to adapt “Romeo and Juliet”, “The Great Gatsby” or all the continent of “Australia”? Because the “Moulin Rouge!” The director, despite his obvious affection for Elvis and his good faith efforts to worship the rock god as he sees fit, can’t help but take advantage of Presley’s iconography in an equally selfish way as Parker exploits his talent. .
Related
Related
Detached from the narrative railings of a Puccini opera, a Shakespeare tragedy, or one of the tightest novels of the 20th century, Luhrmann is free to remix Elvis’ life and times in a prominent Las Vegas magazine. the singular genius of the filmmaker while painfully allowing his own addiction to excess. Even as a tribute, this crazy jukebox musical only sees Presley as a means to an end, like a puppet shaking his hips with a rope. Which may explain why Luhrmann was forced to turn Colonel Tom Parker into the main character in his Elvis movie, “Elvis,” which the trailers had suggested was about someone named Elvis.
It may not be the dumbest thing “Elvis” does, but it’s stupid that no amount of “smart” can make up for it. Luhrmann considers himself a narrator – a layer of distance between opulence and tragedy – and theoretically there is no reason why one of the most important stories of pop culture’s rise and fall could not be told. through the eyes of the Svengali, resembling Mephistopheles, who threw. Presley in the air and left him there in a permanent state of vertigo.
Of course, on paper it sounds about as appealing as a Britney Spears biopic narrated by her father. And of course, on the screen it’s even worse. But it’s not impossible to see the appeal of putting an iconoclastic anti-authoritarian like Elvis in the shadow of the man who controlled him. Even the king bowed to someone, and Luhrmann’s dizzying script (co-written by Sam Bromell, Jeremy Doner, and Craig Pearce) often goes back to the idea that Presley’s life was caught in the crossfire between two Different Americas: one turning to freedom and the other turning it off.
The problem here is that Colonel Parker of Luhrmann – Tom Hanks in an “authentic” performance defined by a thick suit, a fake nose and an accent that I can only describe as the “Kentucky Fried Goldmember” – is possibly the most unbearable. character never conceived. The guy makes Jar-Jar Binks look like Elliott Gould in “The Long Goodbye.” It’s as if Luhrmann was watching Hanks’ performance of “The Ladykillers” and thinking, “Okay, what if, but 100 times and for almost three whole hours?”
“Elvis” – and I wish I was kidding – is like the dream Colonel Parker had before he died. Kind of. Honestly, it’s hard to tell where you are or in what context during a movie that spins in circles like roulette (often too literally) and only slows down for a small handful of appropriate scenes along the way. One second, Colonel Parker walks through a Las Vegas hospital like an old man, and the next, we’re in the middle of “Nightmare Alley” territory while the music entrepreneur walks through a fairgrounds and listens to a new song in the radio while looking for your next carnival geek.
Too bad the black acts don’t sell. Wait a minute! [the camera zooms in on Parker’s neck sweat, spins 360 degrees, speed-ramps through several different frame rates, invents six entirely new aspect ratios, and then lands on the prosthetic nose that only skirts anti-Semitism because no one knows for sure if the Colonel was Jewish] “Is it whhhhyyyyyiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittteee !?” [cash registers, fireworks, time moves in 12 directions at once, you see the moment of your own birth and death unfolding on a Brian de Palma split-screen]. Cut to: Elvis playing “That’s All Right” in a big pink dress while a concert for local teenagers suddenly becomes the “Scanners” scene.
This will not be the last time Luhrmann recognizes the often-discussed role of his subject in the history of American racial relations; just wait until the feverish sequence where the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. it is framed as something that happened personally to Elvis Presley. and it made him feel very sad, but it’s safe to assume that “Elvis” is less interested in the cultural etymology of Presley’s music than in the way rigid black-haired ribbons fall on Austin’s face. Butler every time he speaks sweetly. on a microphone.
To be fair to Luhrmann, it’s quite a spectacle to behold. Butler’s immaculate imitation of Presley would be the best of this film, even if he stayed in the mimicry, but the actor does more than nail Presley’s singing voice and stage presence; he also manages to challenge them, detaching himself from the iconography and giving the film the opportunity to create a new emotional context for a man who has been frozen in time since before the birth of the target audience. Luhrmann.
It is an opportunity that the director rejects at every step. Her Elvis never becomes her own man. Instead, he evolves from an avatar for post-war America to a helpless addict trapped in a golden cage. He has no agency in either mode; Then over the years and bouncing from one newspaper headline to another, Elvis doesn’t look as much like someone who remodeled the 20th century as someone who saw him faint around him and then forced him out. . No wonder Elvis and Forrest Gump seem to keep crossing.
Instead of cutting a meaningful path to guide Elvis through history, Luhrmann simply makes him float through the years in a series of non-stop music that he encounters with an endless series of biopic clichés at the speed of light until the next until it finally overturned a few decades later. . The action moves so fast, and with so little weight, that I literally missed Elvis ’mother’s death.
Back then, I almost never saw her alive in the first place. I only marked her father because Vernon is played by Luhrmann’s usual Richard Roxburgh, while Olivia DeJonge’s Priscilla goes from army brat to cunning mother without stopping to land anywhere in between. At some point they mention Graceland, so is there probably a scene where they buy it? I guess I just forgot a detail like this in the blurring of everything if it weren’t for the fact that Elvis’s entire film career spills over into a single line of Colonel Parker’s narrative that I transcribed verbatim for my sins: “The I did. The highest paid actor in Hollywood history and we had a lot of fun. ” Terrible food, and such small portions.
The songs themselves can be thrilling when anchored in reality: the late scene in which a sequined Elvis makes his way through “Suspicious Minds” is almost strong enough to give the character his own soul. , but most of them come from nowhere. floating randomly out of the ether like a broken record machine. There’s not a single moment in Elvis ’film creating anything; she is just a sexy oracle, she receives music from the collective unconscious and trembles through her body.
It’s as if Presley’s songs have always existed, and Luhrmann’s job is simply to make them new again. The filmmaker’s anachronistic style has always been a key part of his appeal, but here, listening to Doja Cat’s rap on “Viva Las Vegas,” which sounds pretty good, it’s hard not to suspect that his orgiastic exuberance could stem from a lack of faith. in the ability of a modern audience to connect with that topic. If Luhrmann had trusted us to care about Elvis Presley, his film would have found the confidence to try. Instead, Colonel Parker becomes the ultimate scapegoat; It’s okay for Elvis to have no noticeable identity because this is a movie about the cartoon chicken seller who stole from him.
Luhrmann’s sensory overload has resulted in some of the most electric moments in modern cinema, from the aquarium sequence of “Romeo + Juliet” to the combination of elephants in “Moulin Rouge!” and that fantastic party sequence in “The Great Gatsby,” but the hyper-romantic energy of those films helped weave the present into the past in a way that made them feel more alive. “Elvis” does not discover this purpose. He finds so little reason to make Presley’s life a Baz Luhrmann thing …