Baz Luhrmann's 'Elvis' is an exhilarating, maddening spectacle—but one made with love 📝: Stephanie Zacharek (szacharek)
from 2013, a fringed shimmy of decadence and loneliness—are loathed by many for what they see as the director’s garishness, his adoration of spectacle, his penchant for headache-inducing, mincemeat-and-glitter editing. But in 2022, in a culture where long-form series storytelling reigns supreme, Luhrmann’s devotion to two-and-a-half-hour bursts of excess is pleasingly old-fashioned, like a confetti blast from a cannon at a county fair.
Luhrmann and his co-writers Sam Bromell and Craig Pearce use the story of Elvis’ supremely crooked manager, Colonel Tom Parker , to frame the larger, more glorious and more tragic story of Elvis. Though he was born in Tupelo, Mississippi—his identical twin, Jesse Garon, died at birth—grew up poor in Memphis, adoring and being adored by his mother, Gladys . Luhrmann shows us Elvis as a preadolescent, splitting his time between a juke joint and a revival tent down the road.
His rise happens quickly, and before you know it, he’s become the Elvis we know, or the one we think we know: he’s played by Austin Butler, who goes beyond merely replicating Elvis’ signature moves ; he seems to be striving to conjure some phantasmal fingerprint.
Butler conjures the guilelessness of Elvis’ face, his soft yet chiseled cheekbones, the look in his eyes that says, “I’m up for anything—are you?” He and Luhrmann hop through the major events of Presley’s life, sometimes going for long stretches without taking a breath.is exhausting, a mess; it’s also exhilarating, a crazy blur you can’t look away from. We see Elvis shopping at his beloved Lansky Brothers, lured in because one of his favorite musicians, B.B. King shops there.
But as we know, Elvis loses that fight. Colonel Parker sends a quack known as Dr. Nick to pump him full of drugs, to keep him on his feet even as he’s going out of his mind. The tragedy escalates. Does Luhrmann show us the real Elvis, or is he just re-embroidering the Elvis who already lives in our imagination? The answer seems to be that Luhrmann sees equal value in fact and myth. Thoughmore or less follows the facts as we know them, there are moments of invention that are piercing.