The enthusiastically received Elvis is in its third day of national release (if you count the Thursday previews), and it’s time for some reactions from HE regulars.
Kindly, bending-over-backwards, vaguely worded assessments (“It’s not perfect but I love Presley’s pop-chart hits, and there’s no understanding the movie without letting those songs into your soul-stream”) are not welcome. Please lay it out straight.
Joe Popcorn responses on Rotten Tomatoes are at 94% positive. Critics are less sanguine with a 79% response. Elvis has earned a flunking grade on Metacritic (63%) with ticket buyers giving it an 8.5.
I’ve barely written about Elvis myself, except for that 5.26 post-screening riff that I tapped out in Cannes after catching Baz Luhrmann‘s film in the Salles Agnes Varda.
Repeating once again: Elvis isn’t quite as bad as I feared, but several sections are punishing to sit through. It’s a flashy, pushy, often exhausting carnival sideshow, very primary and primitive, clearly made for the ADD peanut gallery…a fairly blunt tool.
Luhrmann, the film’s director, understands the whole Elvis Presley story chapter-and-verse, and the film covers every last important or noteworthy story point, but God, what a crushing, staggering drag to hang out with fatsuit Tom Hanks (as Colonel Tom Parker) for 159 minutes.
Using Parker’s perspective as a framing device was an understandable decision, I guess, but the Hanks presence seems to drain so much of the film’s potential. It kills so much of the music, the invention, the potential fun of it, the all of it. At times it feels as the film is mainly about Parker with Elvis as a prominent supporting character.
Just as Parker became more and more of a pestilence (a constantly interrupting or stifling figure) in Elvis’s life and career, Hanks’ performance becomes more and more unwelcome and deflating from an audience perspective.
Ladies and gentleman, the villain of Elvis’s life! The guy who stifled and nearly smothered Elvis’s career because Elvis was too complacent or blinded or drugged by the big money to see what a bloated, selfish, gambling-junkie, revenue vacuum cleaner Parker had become.
Austin Butler does a good workmanlike job in the title role. He apparently gave everything he had. As Owen Gleiberman has written, Butler looks less like Elvis than the young John Travolta mixed with Jason Priestley. But he worked it hard. Respect.
I adored the moment in which Elvis’s “Memphis mafia” (i.e., the principal parasites) is introduced as if part of a TV show opening-credits sequence. One of Baz’s best moments.