In retrospect, it’s bizarre to consider how widely perceived it was that Baz Lurhmann was a poor choice for an Elvis biopic. If the King is considered the ur-example of gaudy Americana, represented by legions of wigged impersonators stalking the Las Vegas strip with heaving guts stretching the fabric of their jumpsuits following each poorly executed chain of kung-fu strikes, or by the tons of meretricious merchandise littering Cracker Barrel gift shops at every other highway-adjacent strip mall, or by the continual existence of Graceland as a tourist attraction for the curious and pilgrimage site for the faithful, or, if one is willing to venture far enough in the past, back before his post-passing pigeonholing as pop-culture pope and pariah, the stylization of his films and, importantly, his ’68 television special, well, it’s hard to imagine a better filmmaker suited for the task than the Australian director behind Moulin Rouge and Romeo +/- Juliet. He’s an unabashed maximalist, who has devoted the better part of his career to litigating the relevance of the things he loves through aesthetic transformation, primarily through clever (and occasionally cloying) anachronism, assisted by lavish and colorful cinematography, gorgeously excessive set design, and a heaping dosage of unironic melodrama. His films are often quickly perceived as camp, provided they aren’t first considered cool by whatever zeitgeist has seized the culture at the moment, though they have a weird habit of shedding some of that grey critical skin through time’s molting, where an additional historical context — like, say, his Gatsby adaptation being put into strict relief of the post-recession, post-Occupy American culture it was released into — reveals the rich and colorful scales beneath.
In this, Lurhmann and his subject find common ground: stripped of their appropriate frames of reference, you’re left with cultural detritus, the pieces shaped and cobbled together into solutions that might not altogether be “correct,” even if they’re interesting, as if a paleontologist tried to assemble a newly-discovered dinosaur’s skeleton without realizing that he’s missing a quarter of the bones and has placed the creature’s skull on what might actually have been its tail bone. Hence, the uncharitable characterizations: Presley being a thief, pillorying the work of the poor and discriminated so that he himself could become rich and never have to want for another peanut butter and banana sandwich, and Lurhmann as a floppy craftsman without a bone of meaning-making to be found beneath the skin and muscle, who strains for some measure of operatic emotion and provocation without it ever really gelling together into a workable text. Elvis, however, offers a strong rebuttal to both of those ideas and posits that both of them are creative talents — auteurs, to toss out the Film 101 graduate’s favorite word — who have had to fight uphill against the forces of perception and capital in order to assert their personhood, though, of course, Presley’s tale concluded long ago, with his death in a Graceland bathroom at the age of 42 capping off what would ultimately be a tragedy of exploitation.
It’s in that exploitation that Lurhmann finds his antihero, the bulky Austrian (or, as he would say it, West Virginian) carny known as “Colonel Tom Parker,” played by a fat-suited and heavily made-up Tom Hanks, who seems to be hitting a really rich portion of his late-career period within these last few years. He’s begun to shed the image of “America’s Dad,” a sobriquet that’s never made much sense given that Hanks has always done his best work as a goofball or an outcast or as a heavy rather than the kind of stoicism Spielberg often tasks him with. Parker feels as if he were plucked straight out of a Ryan Walker cartoon in the Daily Worker, being a walking embodiment of the worst excesses of capitalism in their most stereotypical physical form: a balding head atop a bloated body, cigar ash seeping its way into the folds of neck fat, eyes on the prowl for a new scam or vulnerable person to sink the razor-tipped sausages he calls fingers into. One day while on tour with a bunch of sideshow acts and country singers, he hears what he thinks is a “race” record playing on a phonograph, and when he’s told that the singer is white, Parker nearly has a heart attack: it’s the sound of the future, and there’s a fortune to be made here.
That vocalist is Elvis (Austin Butler), a poor kid who grew up in shithouse shotgun shacks in the deep South with a doting and hard-working mother and an semi-absent father who spent some time in prison and regards his son with the love and meekness that comes with guilt. It’s in this stew that Elvis falls in love with music: Specifically, the music of the poverty he grew up in, the gospel in the Black churches, the blues in the juke joints, and the country music on the radio. He’s a shaken little leaf in a tempest of the music industry, terrified of crowds and going on stage, but who summons some almost intangible force from the ether to shake people out of their seats, their prejudices, and the propriety. He links up with Parker, and the two of them go on to remake the image of pop music and nearly the whole of American culture while they’re at it, and it’s in Butler that Lurhmann finds his ace in the hole. For much of the first section of the film, he films Butler from behind, his dyed pompadour and gait suggesting enough to the viewer that they’re in a hallowed presence, letting the audience supply the details to compliment the barest hints of mythography that he suggests, until he reveals Butler, in a pink suit, on stage with his band. In pure Lurhmann operatic fashion — quick cuts, frentic pace, exaggerated emphasis — he draws the crowd in and annihilates their expectations: women begin to scream at the slightest wiggle of his legs, men find themselves surprised to be popping along with the beat, and the old folks are horrified. It’s a ferocious introduction to a fantastic performance, with Butler amiably shapeshifting through the eras of Presley’s career while retaining the core of the character, never losing himself in the given aesthetic of a particular time or relying on easy impression. It took Todd Haynes five different actors to capture the facets of Dylan’s arc, and Lurhmann’s got lucky that he found the one.
Yet since we’re witnessing the story through the Colonel’s eyes, with his constant narration emphasizing the difference between the reality of the semi-objective image and his interpretations of said events, Elvis remains wholly unknowable to us, and to his credit, Lurhmann doesn’t spend a ton of time trying to psychoanalyze him beyond what is absolutely necessary for his thesis, which is two-pronged. First, he places him within the context of Americana in all of its forms, best emphasized in the film’s opening moments, which sees Lurhmann linger on various items of kitsch in the Colonel’s office — snowmen, stuffed animals, a snowglobe — before finally using that final item to gorgeously reference Welles’ Citizen Kane, weaving a complex tapestry of high-and-low art. We have thrived as an artistic (and specifically cinematic) culture because of how interlinked these facets of expression are, and without having the other to kick against, there only exists stagnation, a rotting Hollywood sign above a shifting and changing landscape that no longer reflects the folks walking its streets. In him, we saw a synthesis of mainstream crooner culture, the punkish nature of early blusey rock and roll, shitkicker country, and the old time religion: Everything about ’50s America, all at once, too much but never ever enough. Likewise, the anachronisms here — a Doja Cat song or an out-of-place tune — serve a purpose, alluding to the fact that all pop stars draw from his legacy, whether they know so or not. Elvis may be dead, but he haunts us as both cultural icon — a synthesis of all American music, made flesh and vinyl — and as cautionary tale, of what happens when you’ve signed over your life to those who might not have your best interests at heart. And what’s more us than that kind of Faustian bargain?
Second, Lurhmann sees aspects of himself in the King — not in the sense that he would regard himself as that kind of talent or holding that kind of influence over culture — but in their attempts to wholesale blend cultures and eras together in order to push their art forward into a strange new horizon. He is, as much as Elvis was, a cog in a system meant to wring value from the intangibles of human expression, and suffers and benefits from it in equal measure. A moment comes when young B.B. King tells Elvis, after the latter’s nearly thrown in jail for “wiggling” on stage during a show and is half-heartedly persuaded by the Colonel (at the urging of the Southern gentry) to “soften” his image, that he can do whatever the hell he wants on stage. He’s too valuable to them now, as a source of revenue and vote-getting controversy, to be squished like a bug, and, in that initial freedom, Elvis finds liberation, at least before it comes back to bite him when the Colonel’s gambling debts rack up and he’s forced to live the last years of his life as a glorified show-pony in Vegas for hotel-owning mobsters in need of a draw. It’s these moments in which Elvis defies the Colonel’s urgings and his expectations for him that he truly becomes “The King,” or embodies Americana as fully as he can, as defined by Greil Marcus in Mystery Train as a “No” moment, with Presley becoming a Melvillian expression against authority, be it cultural or state-enforced.
This is Lurhmann’s “I would prefer not to,” at least when it comes to the folks that have begged him for years now to apply his sense of aesthetic skill to a project that suits their particular sense of tasteful propriety. Such a concession would rob him of his essential nature, which requires the fulsome trappings of wealth and the bombast of theatricality in order to achieve full effect. It is overwhelmingly sonorous and immediate, pulling us into the nucleus of feeling each time Butler (who performs the songs in a way that would make Rami Malek send his Oscar back to the Academy) hits those high notes and our jaws drop to the floor, and visually intoxicating, be it the backlot evocation of the sets of King Creole in the way Lurhmann emphasizes the falseness of his Hollywood construction or how jarringly he shifts between eras, and how little he cares for the kind of criticisms that will inevitably come about on YouTube channels where VFX artists and make-up artists tear apart imagery without really considering whether or not realism was the first idea on one’s mind. Lurhmann’s films are about feeling, not simply visual splendor, and in Elvis, he has managed to bottle lightning, somehow preserving the ephermeric wonder of listening to “Heartbreak Hotel” or “Jailhouse Rock” or his “American Trilogy” medley for the duration of a two hour and 40 minute biopic without causing one to glance at their watch even once. Moreover, if his mission statement as an artist is to restate the importance of the art he’s always loved to new crowds and enable older folks to see it in a new fashion, then this is his most vital film since Romeo and Juliet. Return of the King, indeed.