"Elvis": Best Picture Nominees 2023 Review Series
The only thing more timeless than Elvis’ music is Hollywood’s emotional entitlement.
Gaudy on-screen graphics and ostentatious whip pans so characteristic of “Elvis” writer and director Baz Luhrman’s projects match the film’s namesake’s on-stage wardrobe but otherwise haunt a movie seemingly made exclusively for The King’s superfans. The mostly chronological dramatization of Elvis Presley’s life covers career highlights and imagined off-stage personal conflicts, all narrated by Colonel Tom Parker, the business manager played by Tom Hanks. The whole movie is a superficial timeline of Elvis’ rise to fame, buoyed by Parker, until his early death, and all the predictable intrafamily squabbling about money, wealth, and fame that accompanies such slice-of-life biopics.
The opening moments follow Parker to the hospital, where in a narration, he explains he’s not necessarily the villain in Elvis’ story, despite siphoning off exorbitant management fees and, at least as this movie tells it, pumping Elvis full of drugs to get him performance-ready. This age of misinformation leaves ample opportunity for creative retelling and alternate fictional endings stuffed with imagination and speculation, in the obtuse but entertaining way Quentin Tarantino decided to kill Hitler at the end of “Inglorious Basterds.” Few dead celebrities have lived on in conspiracy theories like Elvis has, and the over-the-top cinematography and exposition narrated by Parker at first suggested this story could follow a similar route. After all, one of Luhrman’s first major movies was the modern retelling of Shakespeare’s “Romeo + Juliet,” with the original dialogue set in modern times — at least as of 1996. He applied his signature style to “The Great Gatsby” and mastered the musical in “Moulin Rouge!,” bringing fresh takes to straightforward stories.
None of that here. Buried under makeup, Hanks has fun as Parker and employs a “Goldmember”-esque accent to portray the Dutch huckster-turned-entertainment-manager. Austin Butler does not attempt a perfect imitation of Presley, but does capture the deep baritone voice, the cadence, and even the boyish face under coifs of jet black hair. Though he sang during filming, the live performances mostly used remixed original recordings for the final edit. Butler was consistent, but the loose imitation flirted too closely with an absurd parody, and if those are the markers of a Best Actor nomination, that reward should have gone to Hanks.
The inevitability of Elvis’ story simmers under the performances but exposes the rationale for showering the movie with award nominations. It’s a case study in Hollywood’s narcissism, where they see themselves in a performer who can’t handle worldwide stardom and wheelbarrows of money, whose generosity never satiates the hangers-on who always want a little bit more, and business managers and accountants who feel entitled to the fruits of their talent. By a few accounts, Elvis (in real life, not in the movie) justified his notorious drug habit because a doctor was writing prescriptions and he wasn’t buying goofballs from some creep in an alley. It’s the same thinking that entitles Leonardo DiCaprio and Bill Gates to fly private while telling the rest of the peasant class to eat bugs and be happy to stop global warming. The Big Hollywood crowd will sob in empathetic ecstasy from seeing their un-relatable trials laid bare on screen as if for once — ah, yes, finally! — someone thought to tell a story about how hard it is to have a career performing your art and to live in a cozy, insular world of sycophantic adoration.
Elvis’ music has proven timeless. The film concludes with real footage of his last live performance, when he waddles to a microphone, stuffed into his undersized suit, incoherent while speaking but flawless while singing. Just as with fellow Best Picture nominee “Tár,” the storytellers here had an opportunity to ask questions about separating the art from the artist, flaws and all, and an opportunity to evoke some empathy for Elvis’ exploitation by Parker. Instead, the filmmakers here squandered it in favor of a rehashed, navel-gazing, and unnecessary run-of-the-mill biopic about a sad singer with a tragic end. In the 2000s, similar movies followed Ray Charles (“Ray”) and Johnny Cash (“Walk the Line”), both of which earned a smattering of Oscar nominations. These kinds of movies don’t win accolades from peers in the entertainment industry for their artistic merits; the nominations are acts of self-indulgent narcissism: “We think we’re pretty great and misunderstood, so a movie that talks about how great and misunderstood we are must be pretty great too! Now put on your mask while you wait for me to go up on stage and give my acceptance speech, assistant.”
The only thing more timeless than Elvis’ music is Hollywood’s emotional entitlement.