Elvis (2022): Rolling Over in His Grave

When it was released in June, the new Elvis Presley biopic, Elvis, received quite a lot of buzz and became a modest hit. As of September 2022, it’s the 9th highest grossing theatrical release of the year so far – behind Sonic the Hedgehog, and ahead of Uncharted. Elvis started streaming on HBOMax about three weeks ago. Many of my readers may have seen the film already, and I’d love to hear your take on the movie.   

If Elvis was not a biographical picture, just a fictional piece about someone like Elvis Presley – as Bye Bye Birdie was decades ago – it would be an okay entertainment. The production values are quite good, the acting acceptable, the story somewhat ambitious and pretty dark for a fluff picture but interesting enough, etc. But that is NOT what we’re dealing with here. Elvis Presley was a very real person and an American icon.

There have been quite a number of decent to very good movies about legendary musicians and pop stars:  Walk the Line (2005) about Johnny Cash, Ray (2004) about Ray Charles; What’s Love Got To Do With It (1993) about Tina Turner, to name a few. These films tell us something about their protagonists, allow us to appreciate their work, feel their pain, and/or identify in some ways with them as people.  Elvis isn’t in this category. It’s not interested in those things.

If you are a Tom Hanks fan – I mean a BIG fan – and if accuracy, character development, depth of feeling
or depth of any kind do not matter to you (which rules out most Hanks fans), you might enjoy some bits of Elvis – although his appearance as Col. Tom Parker is far from his best film role.  (Some have said it’s one of his worst!)  Even if you really like the director, Baz Luhrmann’s earlier movies Romeo+Juliet (1996) and Moulin Rouge (2001), you probably ought to give this one a miss. If you are hoping for a concert film featuring famous Elvis Presley songs, I think you’ll be disappointed; while quite a number of Elvis hits are featured in Elvis, we only get short snippets of most of them and – of course – you’ll not see or hear Presley, but rather Austin Butler, who portrays him in the movie. In fact, if you are a real Elvis fan, Elvis may well annoy or offend you for its superficiality and untruthfulness . Besides,  there are much better films to see about “The King” (some of which I’ll mention below).

Needless to say, ghosts love the movies. (What else do they have to do?). If the specter of Elvis Presley ever sees this film about himself, he’ll be angry as hell and even more humiliated than he was after it was reported that he had died on the toilet, bloated and drug addled, while trying to defecate. 

So yeah, this review is a pan of Elvis.  

Presley was one of those rare artists who was both an original talent and also a real game changer. His incredible rise from Nowheresville to become the most popular and talked about entertainer of his era would, in and of itself, make for a fascinating and thrilling film. That doesn’t even include the drama and tragedy of his rapid decline to irrelevancy in the early and mid-1960s, his brief resurrection in 1968 with his famous “comeback” tv special, his subsequent failure to take much advantage of that opportunity and his ultimate descent into drug abuse and early death (he was just 42) has more than enough material for another good narrative film (or two).  One of the problems with Elvis is that it bites off more than it can chew, trying to encapsulate everything into one two and a half hour movie – which essentially winds up as a superficial mish-mash.

To squeeze this epic and tragic story into two and a half hours, Lurrmann skips over large chunks of Elvis’s life. The most egregious example is how the film jumps an entire decade from about 1958 to 1968 – during which Elvis focused on making movies - two dozen of them during this elided period. Given his short life, that’s an awfully big jump.

To be sure, there are some nice things one can say about Elvis. At the outset, it does a nice job of showing some of young Presley’s musical influences – the styles and genres he melded together to become the first true iconic figure in rock and roll. In quick succession we see Young Elvis (Chaydon Jay) sneaking into a Black blues club in segregated late 1940s Mississippi and then into a Black gospel church. He is gobsmacked by the soulful, rhythmic, rocking music and the sense of joy, spirit and emotion that packed both places. Along the way, we catch a glimpse (sadly just that) of his poverty-stricken family scraping by. 

When the family moves to Memphis, teenage Elvis meets a number of early 1950s blues and r&b greats hanging in and around Beale street, like  Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola Carter) – the guitar-playing singer of blues, gospel and R&B, whose 1945 hit Strange Things Happening Every Day has been called the first rock and roll song and sure sounds like it;  Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh) – who had the first hit recording of Hound Dog (before Elvis covered it) and another hit with Ball and Chain (later recorded by Janis Joplin); Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup (Gary Clark Jr), whose song That’s All Right Mama became Elvis’s first hit record; and Little Richard (Alton Mason), whose flamboyant performances gave Elvis the idea that he could shake it up too. The portrayals of these rock’n’roll progenitors in action are terrific, coming in a montage of early scenes that, while abbreviated, are effective in demonstrating the debt Elvis’s early sound and style – and early rock in general - owed to these and other Black artists.   

As Elvis, Butler does a pretty good job - even though he does not look much like Presley and given what he’s got to work with. He doesn’t seem like a particularly great actor, but he’s got some of the singer’s onstage moves down and his singing is close enough –  better than many Elvis impersonators. Plus, Butler nails Presley’s speaking voice, especially as the older Elvis. On stage in the mid-1950s, his Elvis looks confident and exciting. Offstage, he seems awfully young, shy and naive. As time moves along, this contrast persists: musically sharp, and otherwise … not so much. This plays into the film’s perspective that the tragedy of Elvis and his ultimate downfall is due to the oversize influence of his manager, the Machiavellian “Colonel” Tom Parker, to whom we’ll return in a moment. 

Overall, however, the portrayal of Elvis is more problematic than enlightening. There are several reasons for this. First, as I’ve mentioned, we don’t get any extended performances of the man doing his big hit songs during his breakout years in the mid-Fifties. This is the period when his music and his act were making him such a huge phenomenon, one that put him eternally on the rock and roll map. I mean, in 1956 alone, coming out of nowhere, Elvis had the top two biggest pop hits of the year in Heartbreak Hotel and Don’t Be Cruel, along with Hound Dog (#8) and I Want you, I Need You, I love You (#14).  All Shook Up was the 15th best-selling single in 1956 and the top selling record of 1957, as well.  The songs were fine, but it was Presley’s performance of them that put these classics over the top; and it’s both disappointing and damaging to the picture’s credibility that the very things that made Elvis a star are largely left out of the film.   

Is it because Butler couldn’t sustain his Elvis impersonation for the roughly two-minute length of any of Presley’s early hits? Or because Luhrmann really doesn’t give a goddamn about the music?  I’d guess the latter. Instead of allowing us to experience an uninterrupted Elvis song performance on screen, Luhrman shows us tiny bits, then quickly turns his camera on the teenage girls in the audience going bananas. The movie’s message seems to be:

Look how excited they are! This guy must be great, right?  Oh, and see the newspaper headlines screaming about this new young singer sensation!

I say, show us – don’t tell us - what made this guy so special. Other music bio-pics have done this quite credibly.  Rocketman, for one recent example, brilliantly portrayed the thrill and magic associated with Elton John’s rise to superstardom through some great performances. In my review of that film, I commented on a scene in which Elton (played by Taron Egerton) made his 1970 US debut at the Troubadour in L.A.:

The movie has him opening with Crocodile Rock, a throbbing, upbeat tune for which the audience goes nuts. Stirred and encouraged by the crowd, John goes a little nuts himself, at one point kicking his piano stool away and literally going horizontal – hands on keyboard, feet flung straight back in the air – an attitude the film holds for an exaggeratedly long time, as if the performer was literally levitating. It is a glorious moment! One that, along with the delirious crowd shots, captures the indefinable, yet undeniable spirit of rock’n’roll at its apex . . . .  John himself has commented on this scene, saying “Honestly, that is what it felt like!” 

  

There are no such moments in Elvis.

Compared to his Black influencers and young contemporaries like Little Richard and Chuck Berry, Elvis had the advantage of being white and thus far more marketable in a segregated society. But what set him apart from other early white rock’n’roll stars? As compared to, say, Carl Perkins or Gene Vincent or Bill Haley or - a year or so later - Jerry Lee Lewis?  Why was he “The King”?  The movie provides nary a clue.

We learn almost nothing about the kind of person Elvis was. Was he smart or dim? Did he have any close friends? In fact, Elvis was sustained by his close relationships with original bandmates Scotty Moore, [guitar], Bill Black [bass] and D.J. Fontana [drums] in the early days, yet this doesn’t figure into the Elvis narrative at all. Nor do his lifetime buddies, known at the time as the “Memphis mafia”.  What were his many relationships with women like? (Reputedly strange, but the film doesn’t touch that topic.)  Well then, what about his fourteen-year relationship with his eventual wife Priscilla? 24-year-old Elvis met her in 1959 when she was just 14; they married eight years later; had a daughter the following year; and divorced in 1973. Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge) is in the movie for just a few moments over three scenes that I saw. Why was THAT relationship given such short shrift?

Here I must confess that I didn’t quite finish the movie, so it’s possible that there are one or two more Priscilla scenes I missed. Maybe she’s at her ex-husband’s funeral, for example. I quit after about two hours, about three quarters through the picture – which took me up to 1969 and Elvis’s triumphant first  performance at the International Hotel in Vegas (where he continued to perform until his death eight years later). Strangely, the longest Elvis “live” performances in the film, by far, came in that first Vegas sequence. He sings most of two songs for us – an (overly) extravagant It’s All Right Mama and his 1969 hit, Suspicious Minds - which also turned out to be his last number-one single. It’s as if, as Luhrmann sees it, this was Elvis’s defining moment.  In truth, the Las Vegas act gave Luhrmann what he seems to like most: the chance to film extravagant, razzle dazzle musical theater style production numbers. 

This was more than enough for me.

The movie raises the question: did Elvis actually care about his music or was he all about being famous and making money? Early in the film, it’s hard to tell. Then, in a recording studio scene, Elvis comes across as a perfectionist.  Still later, as he prepares for his Las Vegas opening, he looks fully in charge of the music and the show.  Still, it seems that it all came down to the money. That’s where Parker hooked him. Better to get rich doing Vegas shows, coasting on his past glories, than to fulfill his dream of doing a world concert tour or seriously working on new material.

Which brings us back to Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks). Thematically, this picture is fundamentally about Parker and his role in luring Elvis away from the rock and roll path in pursuit of celebrity and wealth. The film is even narrated by Parker. His message: it’s just show-biz, one big con. Nothing else matters - art, integrity, personal fulfilment, his client’s health? Nah. Parker is the devil who lures Elvis to his downfall, offering him riches and fame in exchange for his soul.

Elvis, the film, makes no bones about this. The real Parker was an illegal immigrant from Netherlands, whose true name was not Tom Parker, but Andreas Corneliis von Kuijk.  Nor was he a colonel.  Von Kuijk/Parker was a huckster and a fraud. Starting his career as a carnival barker, he eventually movied into music promotion, representing several country music singers, among them Eddie Arnold and Hank Snow, before he found Elvis. 

The premise of Elvis - that Parker ruined Presley by shifting his career away from the rock and roll that made him a star, steering him into a tepid middle of the road mainstream, downplaying the music in pursuit of celluloid celebrity and, later, a Las Vegas attraction - is nothing new, it’s a view shared by many. Still, Parker certainly made some audacious business deals that helped propel Elvis yo superstardom and make him a bunch of money, which seemed to be what Elvis wanted, at least initially.  If Parker enriched himself as well – so what? The problem, in my view, is not that Elvis has adopted this theme, but rather that (a) it is so unsubtle in pressing the point; (b) its characterization of everything else about Elvis Presley is so superficial (as we’ve discussed already); and (c) so much of the narrative is, let’s say, counter-factual. 

Take Tom Parker, for example. Hanks’s Colonel Parker speaks with a weird sort of mid-European accent, perhaps to make him seem alien in a certain way. (And frankly, Hanks – already burdened with a massive fat suit and facial prostheses – is not very consistent with this accent.) But the real Parker did NOT speak with such an accent at all. So why superimpose one?

Another example: Elvis’s early singing style and sexy gyrations were controversial among the older generation, especially in the genteel, conservative South (but not just there) – because it WAS overtly sexual for that era.  Prevalent racism added to the reaction. As we’ve seen, Elvis borrowed a lot from Black music performance styles; and many, especially politicians and pundits, thought it disgusting for a white boy to act like that and a degrading experience for American youth to see or even listen to such stuff.  Elvis appropriately makes a huge deal of this in the early parts of the film. But Luhrmann - never satisfied with reality, if he can hype it up to another level – has the film assert that Elvis was forced to change his performance style or he’d be arrested, his shows cancelled and his career destroyed, if he didn’t “clean up” his act and that Colonel Parker abetted this pressure. According to Elvis, Presley at first resists: we see him onstage, insisting he won’t change, then singing Trouble (“If you’re looking for trouble, you’ve come to the right place”, etc.) - a song that wouldn’t be written for another two years – at which point the local police remove him from the stage and shut down the show.  In fact, Elvis was such a huge star by then, selling millions of records, that he was already too big to shut down. This never happened.  

A final example:  At the center of the film, there is a sequence about the preparations for the 1968 tv show that has now come to be known as Elvis’s “comeback special”. The program was originally envisioned by Parker and NBC TV as a Christmas show, with Presley singing carols and the like. But Elvis rejected that idea because he wanted to do a rock and roll show before a live audience – something fun and dynamic, taking him back to his roots. According to the movie,  Elvis and his producers did not inform Parker or the network of their plans, but sprung it on them – to their shock and horror - in a  guerilla-style ambush. When the cameras start rolling, Elvis comes out, dressed not in a cozy Christmas sweater but in a sexy black leather outfit, and proceeds to rock the joint ! The ambush is a total fabrication. In reality, Elvis overruled the Christmas show idea well in advance and both Parker and NBC consented. Again, why fabricate that story? The comeback special was dramatic enough on its own merits.

Look, I get it. Movies based on real people or events – even bio-pics – commonly leave out stuff and change the facts around some in order to make the story comprehensible within the time limits of the film, and maybe to make the story more dramatic or appealing. But Elvis Presley’s story is plenty dramatic without embellishments, and the falsehoods it rolls out don’t save time or add clarity. When dealing with an icon, it’s important to try to be as faithful to the subject’s reality as possible– to give you a sense of the person, to add to our understanding, and so forth. Elvis does none of these things.   

Beyond that, as I’ve said, it’s a shallow work with little insight, cardboard characterizations of its hero and his antagonist, not much of a concert film, and not even particularly well-acted. For those relatively unfamiliar with Elvis Presley, it may provide the illusion of representing his life, but it’s only true as the barest of outlines, with a barrel of inaccuracies.

  

If you are looking for something better about Elvis Presley, you may want to check out his 1968 Comeback Special, which is available in its entirety on Amazon for around a  $4 rental fee.  There’s also the 1981 film This is Elvis, a sort-of documentary that’s largely uncritical of Presley or Parker, as it was produced by Elvis’s estate – but containing some great clips and giving a good sense of why he was so special back in the day. Free with a subscription to HBO Max and rentable for a modest charge on many streaming platforms.  

Finally, there’s Elvis & Nixon (2016) about a meeting between The King and then President Nixon in 1970. The meeting did happen, although no one knows what was said or much else about it. So, the movie is a work of fiction that imagines what the real event might have been like! It’s funny and endearing,  with Michael Shannon bringing a lot more life to Elvis than Baz Luhrmann and Austin Butler do in Elvis. Streams free with an Amazon Prime membership.

2 hours 39 minutes

Grade: C

Streaming on HBO Max free with subscription; and for rent or purchase ($19.99) on many other streaming services. also, still showing in some theaters.