Some critics note that the story is somewhat incoherent. When you go fast, the plot is less important. Speed is what's important.
I didn't realize until the end credits that Col. Tom Parker was played by Tom Hanks. Wow! Who knew?
One of my Facebook friends notes that Austin Butler and Vanessa Hudgens came into her store in Albuquerque back in 2015. That's just amazing - like they're real people, or something!
The latest entry in the Elvis-making canon is Baz Luhrmann’s cacophonous, fitfully entertaining, and mostly pointless Elvis. Like much of Luhrmann’s work, Elvis is a hyperactive, showy, and gleefully un-subtle affair. Elvis’ Elvis is played by Austin Butler, who does his best with the script he’s given and admirably avoids the pitfalls of impersonation, but whose naturalistic and introspective approach to the role never quite jibes with the garish, near-hallucinatory world of the film.
…From Parker’s early narration we’re meant to gather that Presley was the Colonel’s “snow job” par excellence, a strange conceit from which to introduce all the hagiography that’s to follow. Are we supposed to believe that Elvis was some once-in-a-century musical visionary, or a canny fraud perpetrated on a world full of rubes? Most reasonable music fans would probably argue that the answer is neither; Luhrmann’s film seems to suggest that it’s somehow both.
In its first hour or so, the movie gamely hits all of the familiar beats of Presliography: the staggering early Sun sessions, the subsequent contract with RCA, the scandalous television performances, the military conscription, the death of Elvis’ beloved mother. This period of Elvis’ life is far and away the most interesting—indeed, this period of Elvis’ life is the reason he remains one of the most famous people of the 20th century—but the movie oddly rushes through it, as though it has somewhere else it needs to be. Conversely, an inexplicable surplus of time is spent on Elvis’ 1968 “Comeback Special” which the film seems intent on depicting as some sort of career pinnacle, a silly attempt to insinuate Elvis into the late-1960s counterculture.
…The frantic, kitchen-sink nature of all of this lends an overarching glibness to the film, which is almost an impressive feat given its 159-minute running time. In particular, the movie’s approach to race—surely the most controversial and forever unsettled aspect of Elvis’ legacy—is gallingly obtuse. … The movie’s depictions of Black music-making often feel flagrantly racist, shot after leering shot of carnal, frenetic ecstasy, while whole traditions like gospel, blues, and R&B are reduced to raw material for Elvis to bring forth to benighted white masses. One especially strange scene features Elvis fleeing hordes of fans to catch Little Richard performing “Tutti Frutti” in a small club in Memphis, an encounter the movie depicts as a moment of Promethean discovery for Elvis. But “Tutti Frutti” was already a national hit before Elvis had even released a single on RCA; many Americans, white and Black, had heard Little Richard before they’d ever heard Elvis Presley.
…It’s odd, then, that Elvis’ most flummoxing flaw is an inclination towards a sort of characterological moralism. For all the feedback-drenched electric guitars and trap-inspired 808s on the film’s soundtrack, the most anachronistic element of Elvis is its cloying need to assure us that its hero was a good person, as if trying to preemptively counter some imagined onslaught of TikToks about why Elvis Presley is problematic. The movie goes to pains to depict Elvis as a man of liberal conscience who is deeply moved by the various political and social crises facing the United States in his lifetime but whose activist inclinations are repeatedly thwarted by the dastardly Parker. (The film studiously avoids any whiff of the later-in-life Presley’s obsessions with law-and-order conservatism.)
