DIRECTOR FILMS CARNY ATMOSPHERE

EXCITEMENT OF GLOBAL SUPERSTAR RECREATED

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The Elvis Presley story has been told and retold and spun more often than not into a parody.

But director Baz Luhrmann takes just a few seconds to indicate to the next generation of Elvis fans that the 2hr 39 minute film runtime will be something quite different in Elvis (2022).

The music biographical film stars Austin Butler as Elvis Presley.

Luhrmann films from the perspective of Elvis’ long time promotor, Colonel Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks.

A voice over by Hanks, as Parker, is frequently used to underscore that the perspective of the camera is that of the carny huckster that came to promote the first and possibly greatest global rock star.

Parker began his promoting career as part of the travelling carnivals in Tennessee and the American south that blended circus tricks, amusement rides and music performances, and a bit of vaudeville. 

This carny theme recurs throughout the film with shots of the Presley family home in Memphis overrun by a kind of the carnival atmosphere, including fans pressing at the mansion gates and the evolving shapes of go-carts driven in circuit on the front lawn of Graceland to indicate the passage of time where nothing else changes.

Luhrmann’s task is clear: to portray a pop culture icon whose impression has barely been faded from the collective consciousness even though his presence has passed long ago. 

The director uses satire to spin the desire for international fame and the corresponding unimaginable riches into something ever so slightly more real than a comic book.

Multi-media collages of newspaper headlines and banner notification are pasted over early scenes as if the film’s producers are avid fans of scrapbooking.

In this way, the director mirrors the rapid ascent of Elvis from the draw of carny visitors to the Louisiana Hayride to the impact of performances in front of global television audiences.

Luhrmann also uses film montage scenes to accelerate the passage of movie time through important moments of the world famous biography.

The narrative begins with Elvis as a child in poverty stricken Tennessee running into childhood adventure and finding the early influences on his career of black gospel and black rhythm and blues music.

Elvis would become the world’s first global rock star by fusing the influences from black culture and black music with white country music, including the physical movement and dance of black performers.

Luhrmann shows that these black influences compelled the music and artistry of Elvis as a showman into the popular mainstream where black artists had still not been accepted.

Elvis also found his own style in the singing joints on Beale Street in Memphis, where he would mingle among the audiences drawn in by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, B.B. King and Little Richard.

Yola plays Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Kelvin Harris plays B.B. King, and Alton Mason, Little Richard.

The script though is more complicated than another modern musical biopic about superstars struggling personally with their own demons.

To Elvis, family is always important, and he creates family and maintains family through his rockstar career, but then he consequentially becomes heartbroken by the loss of his mother and the separation from his beautiful wife and young daughter.

Olivia De Jonge plays Elvis’ wife, Priscilla, while Helen Thomson plays mother, Gladys Presley, and Richard Roxburgh plays Elvis’ father, Vernon.

Luhrmann makes the racial conflict in the United States at the time of the Civil Rights Movement a recuring theme throughout the film, with Elvis revisiting the black musical establishments on Beale Street after obtaining fame and fortune. Scenes are dedicating to the life of Civil Rights Leader Martin Luther King and United States Presidential Candidate Bobby Kennedy, and on how their assassinations affected Elvis.

Through these real moments of Americana, Elvis continues on as the personification of America in decline, with the director using a satirical tone to push the script ever so gently toward surrealism.

Elvis had all the fame and fortune one could wish for, but the Elvis Presley Enterprise always found money to be in scarce supply as a business. 

Butler totally transforms into Elvis after just a few introductory scenes. Luhrmann seemingly splices in real footage of Elvis to make the transference all the more surreal, with Butler wearing a facial prosthetic for the last performances of Elvis in Las Vegas as an overweight, prescription drug addicted, obviously near death global phenomenon.

Butler captures the public personality of Elvis, drawing in the movie audience as much as the rock star did his millions of fanatical admirers at rock and roll concerts.

Hanks pulls off another iconic transformation by putting on a body suit and facial prosthetic, including a prosthetic nose, to become Parker. But Hanks also acts behind the makeup, shifting through the human emotions while delivering several lines in that Hank’s trademark humor.

The film does seem a bit overdone at certain points in the narrative, particularly at the beginning when the collage becomes distracting after the director had already made the point about comic book superheroes and the real time ability to obtain the real world powers that come with fame and fortune.

Luhrmann also embarks on a career retrospective beginning with the early recordings by Sam Philips at Sun Records and ending with the last Las Vegas shows as part of the five year residency, instead of focusing on one moment in time, such as the four sold out shows at Madison Square Gardens in New York City.

The narrative remains pretty linear but becomes complicated and multidimensional with all the goings on in the real world as well as the global impact of the Elvis phenomena on the world and on Elvis personally.

And Luhrmann seems to purposely keep the cohesion of the film tethered to the end of a long thread, much like Elvis’ meteoric career.

The other problem with the film is that the script more or less retells a well known storyboard of rock star events, such as the ’68 Television Comeback Special and the Las Vegas residency.

And in musicals, the use of a popular music to compel scenes, and the popular music performed in scenes by the biopic character, in place of an original movie score seems like a cheat, whereas an original music score used in a biopic drama to compel the narrative is more powerful.

The fine camera work is artful with many scenes fueled by a type of imagination that may have been influence by other films about this culture in the American south such as the Wizard of Oz (1939), Gone with the Wind (1939), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and Mississippi Burning (1988).

The camera seamlessly flows from Beale Street into the upper floor windows of the rhythm and blues clubs, as if the director is fulfilling his dreams like little Dorothy in Oz, caught on the edges of a tornado.

And so, the ensemble cast of Australian actors, wearing American country costumes and Memphis metaphysical masks, instead of a cast of American actors from the South, is all the more befitting the international celebrity status that everyone the world over claims a bit as their own.

Elvis is currently playing in theaters.