Like Elvis Presley Himself, ‘Elvis’ Is Fully Captivating Despite Its Flaws

For years — since even long before the internet took over — there’s been a soundbite circulating of Elvis Presley falling apart in the middle of a concert at Las Vegas in 1973. Presley is apparently obsessed with rumors that somehow got back to him concerning the state of his mental health, and more specifically that idea he was having a drug problem. “I heard that I was strung out on heroin,” he starts. Getting increasingly angry, he focuses on the alleged source of the misinformation: “I swear to God, hotel employees, freaks that carry your luggage up to the room.…” Now livid, he screams at the audience, “If I find or hear the individual that has said that about me, I’m gonna break your goddamn neck, you son of a bitch. That is dangerous, that is damaging to myself, to my little daughter, to Priscilla, to my father, my doctor, my friends … I will pull your goddamned tongue from the roots.” Suddenly self-conscious, Presley realizes he’s crossed some lines and is actually scaring an audience that loves him. Coming back to himself, he abruptly returns to the matter at hand and starts to introduce his next song, “How many of you saw the movie ‘Blue Hawaii?’”In my younger and more vulnerable years, before I became an Elvis fan, I would play that audio clip for friends and laugh hysterically. Ever since I saw the Elvis light, I can barely bring myself to listen to it, as it’s quite the most tragic thing I’ve ever heard: a major figure in American music, an incredible talent who was only 38 years old and still had so much to offer the world, disintegrating in public.That specific moment is not reproduced in the new biography film “Elvis,” essentially produced, directed, and written by Baz Luhrmann, the rather outrageous Australian filmmaker who is quite a cultural icon in his own right — perhaps more controversial than Elvis himself ever was. While he doesn’t show the “drug rant,” he does reconstruct other instances of Presley imploding on stage; there’s an infamous moment when Presley chews out the “hierarchy” of the Hilton corporation even while he’s performing at the Las Vegas International Hilton. Mr. Luhrmann uses this historical incident to craft a scene in which Presley instead verbally attacks and fires his longtime manager/partner, Colonel Tom Parker, in full view of the capacity crowd.It didn’t happen exactly that way, but it’s good storytelling. In terms of factual accuracy, Mr. Luhrmann and his three credited collaborators on the screenplay (Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, and Jeremy Doner) get everything mostly correct: If I were grading them on the documented truth, they’d probably score 80 or even 90 percent, which is considerably higher than the writers of nearly every other biography movie.In terms of visual accuracy, the movie is stunning. Nearly every element of Elvis’s career has been replicated with incredible attention to the most minute details, such as the photos of Elvis and his father, Vernon, sitting on the steps of Graceland and sobbing unstoppably over the death of his mother, Gladys. Likewise the use of the exact shade of pink and cut of his suit in his first appearance as part of the “Louisiana Hayride” in January 1955. I don’t so much mind that Mr. Luhrmann deliberately didn’t reproduce exactly what songs Presley sang that night, or that he made that the night Presley and Parker first met (it wasn’t). Mr. Luhrmann gets the essential arc of the story correct. As Stephen Colbert would say, it has a palpable “truthiness.” Would that the musical portion was so accurate; Mr. Luhrmann insists on “remixing” — apparently a millennial euphemism for “defiling” — Presley classics with ingredients of hip-hop, sometimes using the King himself and sometimes with vocals by Austin Butler, who plays him on screen. Still, “Elvis” is perhaps the first Luhrmann film I can unhesitatingly recommend. “Moulin Rouge” (2001) was an enjoyable episode of inanity for its first half at least, and then tanked in Act two when it began to take its own hogwash too seriously. “The Great Gatsby” (2013) had some excellent performances, by Tobey McGuire and Joel Edgerton especially, but they were buried under layers of dizzying and distracting editing and unlistenable soundtrack music. I keep hoping someone will re-edit Mr. Luhrmann’s “Gatsby” in a special “non-director’s cut.” Conversely, if there is a special, extended edition of “Elvis,” as is rumored, then I’ll be first in line to see it. Although “Elvis” is 159 minutes long, that’s barely enough time to tell the story of one of the most consequential lives of the 20th century. Here, however, Mr. Luhrmann’s particular directorial flourishes help the story, and the pace is exhilarating rather than rushed. At times the cutting and the visuals are so overwhelming it makes the viewer feel like what Elvis himself might have experienced on an amphetamine high; it could almost be a trailer for itself. Still, I’d be willing to watch more of this movie, even at mini-series length.As another biopic, “The Social Network,” stated, every creation myth needs a devil, and this being, essentially, the story of the birth of modern popular music, it has Colonel Tom Parker as Presley’s savior and ultimately his bete noire. Mr. Luhrmann made one move to portray Parker in a sympathetic light, and that was to cast Tom Hanks in the role. Other than that, the colonel is portrayed as the engine of Elvis’s rise to superstardom but also of his ultimate destruction. The movie charges the colonel with taking even more than the 50 percent of Presley’s earnings that the singer agreed to and, worse, with thwarting him artistically, pressuring him to make cheesy movies with big paychecks and to record cheesy songs that they jointly owned a piece of. Elvis is in much better shape for the last 15 minutes of that 1973 Vegas concert. After “Hawaiian Wedding Song,” he brings one of his backup singers to the front of the stage and they reprise the last line together. He introduces his engineers, his father, and, as he starts to announce “my manager, Colonel Tom Parker,” he asks, “Is the colonel around anywhere? He’s out playing roulette, don’t kid me.” (Now there’s a tell.) He also sings “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” and in talking to the audience, shows his warmth, humanity, and, especially, his humor that the movie only rarely captures. When he holds up his jewelry, he announces to the house, “You should see it, because you paid for it.” Just the same, Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” is a movie worth seeing both because of and in spite of its flaws.

Like Elvis Presley Himself, ‘Elvis’ Is Fully Captivating Despite Its Flaws

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