ELVIS Is A Great Film About How Not-Great Elvis Is

  It may take years to sift through the wreckage that "Bohemian Rhapsody" has laid to the musician biopic genre. The 2018 film, which was (credited as) directed by (alleged) sex pest Bryan Singer, was kind of terrible. It's an incoherent mess that very much feels like the epitome of the phrase "we'll fix it in post!" Nevertheless, it made over $700 million at the worldwide box office, and won multiple Oscars, in spite of being one of the most reviled nominees in recent history by most highbrow film critics. Allow me to openly and unambiguously back the highbrows here. "Bohemian Rhapsody" established the musician biopic as a sort of superhero movie for fully grown adults: the audience sees a thing they recognize and claps, with no regard for the filmmaking itself. We know this because that film's custodian, Dexter Fletcher, released his own directing project "Rocketman" about 6 months afterwards. "Rocketman" is a much better production, in large part because it takes a fantastical approach to musical performances. It's all very creative. But it didn't make the dopamine go brrrr by recreating a thing that the audience would recognize, and it presented its protagonist's homosexuality head-on, so it settled for under $200 million in theatrical revenue ($195m on a $40m budget is a solid intake, no doubt, but it's not quite a blockbuster) and no Oscar nominations outside of an original Elton John song, despite far better reviews. Thus the genre seems destined for mediocre awards bait, like the set of films that inspired "Dewey Cox".

 Then Baz Luhrmann wanted to make an Elvis movie. Luhrmann's editing style is so maximalist that stylization was inevitable. Obviously this contrasts with the bland realism that was driving the more successful musician movies. And hey, to the credit of the general audience, they responded to a 160 minute period piece with a visual style that flips the bird in the face of good taste. Yes, the whole thing really is like that viral "he's white!" clip in its sheer quantity of cuts and insistence on wild zooms. Yes, Tom Hanks really does wear that fat suit and speak that accent the whole time. What makes Elvis both better than other recent music biopics and better than other Baz Luhrmann films is the way it uses artifice as a weapon to tackle an artificial figure.

THE ELVIS “HE’S WHITE??” CLIP FINALLY DROPPED pic.twitter.com/lwMABts7ox

— fahrenheit periodt (@duddersj) August 9, 2022

 "Elvis" the film has a few different big ideas about Elvis the man, and none of them have any interest in building up 'Elvis' the legend. The most essential of these ideas is about race. Luhrmann is aware that a huge chunk of Elvis' appeal was the premise that a pretty white boy was making so-called black music. Black can be substituted for edgy, or rock, if you're not feeling confrontational, but there's the unavoidable aspect that Elvis was making black music and making money doing it, while the actual black musicians Elvis hung around with and "borrowed" ideas from did not make a tremendous fortune. I'm not terribly interested in the distinction between "borrowed" or "stole" or "influenced by" or "ripped off" here, because it was the 1950s and all music was covers, but I do find it notable that Luhrmann is upfront about how unoriginal the music of Elvis Presley was. As a director he's also hyperaware of the racial dynamics of the era. Presley's whiteness makes him sellable, even while black musicians who are portrayed as better (or at least equally good and more original) performers are stuck in small venues away from white audiences. When Luhrmann says that he wanted an Eminem song on the film's soundtrack because Eminem and Elvis are the same person, he's so obviously correct that Eminem had already made this observation in a radio single 20 years ago. In short, it's the correct take, and it's filmed in such abrasive ways that it's hard not to love, but I imagine it's only a hot take with actual racists. 

 A bit more interesting, to me, is how willing the film is to admit that Elvis is a better performer than a musician. This might sound a bit similar to the race aspects, but it is in fact a totally different issue. Yes, Elvis made money by repackaging black music to white people. But specifically, he made the most money packaging it to teenage girls. The first concert sequence, and indeed most of the film in the first act before Elvis becomes Hollywood famous, is obsessed with Presley's sexuality. He shakes and dances and *wiggles*, which is the script's favored word for Presley's uniquely horny style of moving on stage. That wiggle makes him a sensation of a celebrity. It also leads to plenty of quick frames of people who aren't teenage girls not really feeling the Elvis Presley performances. Young men think he's intimidating, old men think he's offensive, and older women think he's amusing in a silly way. Country singer Hank Snow is made a character in this film purely so the story has an air quotes real artist to criticize Presley's performance style. "Elvis" is a very long film which covers a very long stretch of time, but it stays relatively consistent with how rare it is for anyone who's not a teenage girl to be genuinely impressed with his music. The film grants him a couple of exceptions where genuinely impressive music was made (namely, his 1968 TV special and his first Vegas residencies), but even those are hedged. The TV special audience is, as a character points out, a paid crowd of people too young to truly care about Elvis' music. And the Vegas residency quickly turns into a Hotel California-esque trap, offering no escape and sucking the life out of whatever Elvis Presley thought was initially fulfilling. I can't say for sure whether Luhrmann wants the audience to think Elvis is a less impressive singer than some of his black counterparts, but that's the impression I got from watching Big Mama Thornton perform "Hound Dog". The Elvis of "Elvis" is more sellable than he is good.

 I have no idea whether the real Elvis Presley was really embarrassed by his film career, but certainly that's how the script portrays it. A-list movie star Elvis is treated as an afterthought, a compilation of corny concepts written around hearing Elvis sing some songs. Elvis had some ambitions of acting in "real" movies, at some point, but audiences only wanted to see him sing, so that's what he did, in increasingly awful pictures. Being a Baz Luhrmann film, in the third act he has his Elvis character say out loud that he never made a movie he could be proud of, just in case that idea was too subtle for some. This is hardly the main idea of the film, but it is an interesting one to me, as it's one more space where Luhrmann purposely concedes that Elvis isn't all that talented of an artist. Usually a biopic like this builds up the credentials of its protagonist, insists why they're important. "Elvis" has no interest in doing that for Elvis. He sold sex appeal in his youth, and corny nostalgia in his later years, and any aspirations of making art were squashed by The Colonel Tom Parker. (I will myself concede that Tom Hanks was a poor casting choice, and is the only thing holding "Elvis" back from a perfect grade in my book.)

 It's lovely that Luhrmann gave us a music biopic of such depth. Doubly lovely is the attention to detail that was put into the visual style. The film looks to my eye a lot like Oliver Stone's "JFK" in how different camera qualities were used represent different aesthetics and eras. As best as I can tell a lot of this film was shot digitally and those effects were done with lenses. I found it extremely convincing. Sometimes we move from color to monochrome for news footage, sometimes the aspect ratio shifts suddenly only to switch back a few moments later (at some point during Elvis' hospitalization, the screen got even wider than its already as-wide-as-normal-movies-go 2.39:1 aspect ratio. I gasped.). It's a triumph of style, in a movie that persuasively argues Elvis Presley was most of all a triumph of style. This is the finest music biopic to come out at least since 2015's "Straight Outta Compton", and it might be even better than that off of the sheer ambition put into its aesthetic.