Moulin Rouge director BazLuhrmann throws his whole mad heart into the alternately ridiculous and sublime biopic Elvis.
The first time we get a good look at the title character of Baz Luhrmann’s caffeinated Wikipedia spectacular, Elvis, he’s stepping out of the shadows and onto a stage in Louisiana, ready to perform for a crowd totally unaware that they’re about to witness the coronation of the future king of rock ’n’ roll. Decked out in pink from shoulders to ankles, the 19-year-old heartthrob hesitates, and the audience, smelling blood, heckles him.
Luhrmann’s MTV overdrive approach might be as strategic as it is pathological. Elvis can only cover all the ground it needs to cover at warp speed, telling elements of its decades-spanning true story through implication and shorthand. The rise to fame. The battle against scandalized moral scolds. The subsequent backlash to the compromised, pastor-friendly Elvis, which is basically the singer’s Dylan-goes-electric moment in reverse. Elvis races through all of it.
Parker narrates the film, repeatedly insisting that Elvis’s eventual decline and death were a product of his tireless devotion to putting on a show, even as what we see puts the blame more squarely on the conniving, controlling guidance of his manager. That’s a potentially ingenious angle, to frame the story around the unreliable deflections of its villain. Hanks, though, is unusually, almost impressively atrocious in the role.
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