Elvis review: Baz Luhrmann's anti-biopic is all visual kinesthetics, very little substance

Austin Butler in Baz Luhrmann's 'Elvis'. Luhrmann and his writers don't seem to be deeply invested in either the life of Elvis Presley or the roots of the sexy fusion of country and blues that Presley pioneered. (Image: WB)

Actor Austin Butler’s Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s pop-operatic, explosively sparkly biopic of the showman-singer is worlds apart from Michael Shannon’s reprisals of the role in Liza Johnson’s Elvis & Nixon (2016), a wildly funny take on an encounter between Elvis and US President Nixon, with Elvis urging the president to swear him in as an undercover agent for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, for the sake of rescuing America from “libertine and leftist” bands like The Beatles who were taking the dangerous drugs. What a riot it was! Shannon is not the perfect Elvis—at least not in the way his voice modulates or how he looks, but he channeled an essence of the Memphis star, by then overweight and lonely, in a way that Butler is not required to do in Luhrmann’s biopic—or rather, anti-biopic.

Luhrmann’s film, written by him along with Jeremy Doner, Craig Pearce and Sam Bromell, is about two men—Elvis and his long-time manager Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), a creepy, exploitative shark of a man who manipulated Elvis for his own sake and ensured Elvis remained in Las Vegas residency forever while the road around him moved on. The last years of Elvis, until his lonely death at the age of 41, were stuff of pathos—his body and face had filled out with all the unburnt calories from binge-eating and popping pills. Luhrmann is not interested in the pathos at all. His Elvis, from growing up in hardship as a mama’s boy in a puritanical Catholic family, to being influenced deeply by the music of black musicians and the blues, to his marriage to Priscilla Presley, their break-up is told with the relationship between Elvis and the Colonel as an anchoring thread.

Elvis is even given a leftist, liberal aura—the killing of Martin Luther King (“He told the truth, Dr King”) and racial discrimination stun him with grief. His pelvis-swivelling moves are a triumph of sexual liberation and artistic freedom over conservatism and family virtues that country music extols. Luhrmann and his writers aren’t deeply invested in either the life of Elvis Presley or the roots of the sexy fusion of country and blues that Presley pioneered. He is primarily a family man, in love with his wife and in bed with “dolls” or groupies in hotel rooms just because he is a rockstar and rockstars do that. His other affairs, most significantly, with Ann-Marget, a Vegas singer, don’t get a single scene.

The visual kinesthetics are where the efforts are—as with the case in most Baz Luhrmann films. Two split screens give way to eight split screens, and then they whirl to the best of Elvis songs. The film is so obsessed with pace, music, light, editing and movements that it is more of a montage of Elvis’ life than a biopic—an anti-biopic or a trailer to a biopic. There’s even a hall of mirrors scene between Elvis and the menacing manager, a role Hanks performs with a lot of effort—adopting a consistent nasal voice and maintaining a mystery about his past until the end when Luhrmann ends the character’s trajectory as an epilogue in words.

Butler impersonates the swag, the gyrating and swivelling and his overall electric stage persona efficiently; Olivia DeJonge as Priscilla is endearing in her small role.

What could’ve been a terrific portrait of a relationship between a gifted musician and his mercenary, controlling manager ends up being a solipsistic, superficial imagination of what Elvis was—the romantic notion of a star gone too soon, too lonely is the only thing that interests Luhrmann. If not for the signature razzle-dazzle of a Luhrmann film, facilitated by the brilliant cinematography of Mandy Walker, Elvis would have been an insufferable film.

Elvis released in theatres on Friday.